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FORCES  IN  FICTION 
AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 


FORCES  IN  FICTION 
AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 


BY   RICHARD  iBURTON 


INDIANAPOLIS 

THE  BOBBS-MEEEILL  COMPANT? 

PUBLISHERS 


Copyright  1902 
The  Bowen-Merrill  Company 


^^& 


/ 


^ 


PRESS  OF 

BRAUNWORTH  &.  CO. 

BOOKBINDERS  AND  PRINTERS 

BROOKLYN,  N.  Y. 


CONTENTS 

The  Fundamentals  op  Fiction  5 

The  Cult  of  The  Historical  Romance  19 

The  Love  Motive  in  Modern  Fiction  31 

The  Dark  in  Literature  il 

Poetry  and  The  Drama  60 

The  Development  of  Technique  in  The  Drama       68 

The  Essay  As  Mood  and  Form  85* 

The  Modern  Need  for  Literature  100 

Past  and  Present  in  Literature  119- 

The  Use  of  English  127 

A  Note  on  Modern  Criticism  143 

Literature  As  Craft  150 
I.   The  Love  of  The  Fine  Phrase 
II.    What  Is  Literary  Merit 
III,  Music  and  Emotion  in  Poetry 

Indoors  and  Out  :  Two  Reveries  168 


211G18 


FOE  PERMISSION  TO  REPRINT  THE  PAPERS 
IN  THIS  VOLUME  THANKS  ARE  DUE  TO  THE 
EDITORS  OF  THE  FORUM,  THE  BOOKBUYER, 
THE  PHILADELPHIA  SATURDAY  EVENING 
POST,  THE  INDEPENDENT,  THE  CRITERION, 
AND  THE  NEW  ENGLAND  MAGAZINE.  ^»i  ^#i 


Of  -Wi 


U««VER»»-^ 


OF 
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FORCES  IN  FICTION 

AND 

OTHER  ESSAYS 

THE  FUNDAMENTALS  OF  FICTION 

Good  novel-making,  technically  viewed,  rests 
four-square  upon  invention  (plot),  construction, 
characterization,  and  description.  These  may  be 
called  the  fundamentals  of  fiction.  The  form  of 
literature  known  as  the  story  is  often  spoken  of 
carelessly  or  in  shallow  wise  as  if  its  manner — ^its 
style  or  diction — were  the  chief  thing,  even  the 
only  thing.  "Have  you  read  so  and  so?"  queries 
one  lady  of  another  in  the  car.  "The  idea  isn't 
anything,  but  then,  you  know.  Brown  writes  so 
well!  His  style  is  so  good!"  Again,  with  the 
great  class  of  uncritical  readers,  represented  in  the 
lower  grade  by  the  blue-clothed  messenger  boy  in 
the  car  immersed  in  the  latest  number  of  the 
"Fireside  Companion,"  plot  outweighs  every  other 
consideration.  Possibly  it  does  with  the  majority 
of  all  novel-lovers. 

But  if,  looking  to  the  permanent  successes  and 
great  names  of  fiction,  we  ask  ourselves  what 
qualities  constitute  the  essentials  of  fiction,  we 
5 


6  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

shall  be  likely  to  settle  on  these  fundamental 
four.  Furthermore,  if  forced  to  pick  out  the 
quality  ministering  most  to  the  successful  result, 
we  must,  I  fancy,  reply:  character-creation.  This 
judgment  may  fall  strange  on  the  ear  nowadays, 
because  other  traits  are  emphasized — construction 
or  style,  for  example.  Indeed,  if  we  examine  the 
clever  work  of  present-day  novelists,  we  shall  find 
that  what  often  gives  them  reputation  is  ability  in 
ways  aside  from  this  central,  this  solar,  gift  of 
characterization.  Compared  with  it,  invention 
and  construction  are  secondary;  description  and 
style,  important  as  they  may  be  in  the  abstract, 
are  as  naught.  A  novel  without  salient  character- 
drawing,  whatever  its  merits  in  other  directions, 
can  never  take  high  rank;  it  is  almost  certainly 
a  failure  foredoomed. 

The  truth  of  the  proposition  becomes  apparent 
when  we  come  to  apply  it  and  illustrate  by  it. 
The  firm,  steady  hold  upon  the  public  of  certain 
fictionists,  who  are  more  or  less  roughly  handled 
by  critics,  is  easily  explained,  if  we  agree  to  this 
central  place  of  importance  held  by  character- 
limning.  Master  improvisers  like  Dumas  and 
Scott  showed  their  genius  just  here.  Their  per- 
sonages live;  the  robust  types  they  created  are 
realized  to  the  imaginations  of  readers;  so  that 
to  kill  off  the  sense  of  their  existence  would  liter- 
ally leave  the  actual  world  lonelier  for  many  of 
us.  The  folk  next  door  are  real ;  we  know  it  in  a 
perfunctory  way.     But  they  are  phantoms  com- 


THE   FUNDAMENTALS    OF   FICTION  7 

pared  with  the  verity  of  the  Three  Guardsmen,  or 
of  Di  Yernon  and  Dandie  Dinmont. 

Dickens,  to  take  a  later  novelist,  is  perhaps  the 
best  possible  example  of  this  paramount  power 
which  excuses  shortcomings  in  other  directions. 
Is  there  any  other  maker  of  story  in  modern  Eng- 
lish literature — after  all  allowances  have  been 
made,  and  not  forgetting  that  some  current  criti- 
cism of  the  man  of  Gadshill  will  have  it  that  he  is 
for  a  more  careless  age — who  has  begun  to  fur- 
nish such  a  portrait-gallery  of  worthies  and 
adorable  grotesques — a  motley  crowd  whom  we 
all  know  and  enjoy  and  love?  I  wot  not.  The 
fact  that  Dickens  is  at  times  a  trifle  inchoate  or^ 
careless  in  his  English,  or  allows  his  exuberance 
to  lead  him  into  exaggeration,  or  fails  to  blend 
perfectly  the  discordant  elements  of  comedy  and 
tragedy,  sinks  into  insignificance  when  set  over 
against  such  a  faculty  as  this.  He  was  a  veritable 
giant  here. 

Scott,  too,  was  by  no  means  firm-handed  in  the 
matter  of  construction;  his  huddled  endings  so- 
called — that  is,  his  inability  to  close  a  book  in 
due  proportion  to  its  main  action  and  in  a  way 
to  make  the  issue  seem  inevitable — must  be  con- 
ceded to  critical  scrutiny.  The  reason  of  it  lies 
in  this  same  power  he  had  in  character-concep- 
tion. When  he  had  fully  sketched  in  his  types, 
had  presented  them  full-view  to  the  audience,  his 
interest  in  their  case  waned  a  little.  Hence  he 
was  not  so  adept  in  getting  rid  of  them  neatly,  as 


8  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

the  novelist  with  an  eye  to  a  good  finish  must  be, 
unless  he  supinelyadopt  the  invertebrate  method  of 
a  Henry  James  and  dismiss  the  notion  of  any  plot 
or  argument  at  all  for  the  story,  which  may  be 
high  art,  but  is  chilling  in  effect  upon  the  patrons. 
The  very  methods  of  work  of  the  Abbotsford  Sage 
were  inimical  to  the  highest  results  of  construc- 
tion. He  did  not  make  a  scenario^  blocking  out 
his  work  and  seeing  it  in  the  round  as  he  began 
to  write.  Eather,  his  imagination  fired  by  a  scene 
or  a  character,  he  reeled  off  page  after  page  of 
manuscript,  throwing  them  upon  the  floor,  with 
no  thought  of  revision. 

Dickens,  for  his  part,  was  all  his  days  under 
the  bondage  of  serial  publication.  He  wrote  witti 
twenty-parts  in  mind;  and  his  tales  would  have 
been  different  in  length,  management,  and  even 
in  the  number  of  actors,  had  he  been  independent 
of  this  practical  restriction.  One  has  only  to  read 
"Forster's  Life"  to  be  impressed  by  this  fact.  It 
was  not  until  comparatively  late  in  his  career  that 
he  gave  much  care  to  the  matter  of  construction. 
To  see  how  an  artistic  conscience  developed  in  him 
with  experience,  compare  early  works  such  as 
'Tickwick  Papers"  and  "Nicholas  Nicklehy"  with 
a  late  success,  "Great  Expectations." 

Fecundity  of  invention  may  or  may  not  consist 
with  this  most  precious  gift  of  character-creation. 
Scott  no  doubt  may  be  said  to  have  had  a  decided 
instinct  for  fable,  even  for  plot.  Dickens  pos- 
sessed it  in  a  less  degree.    Books  containing  his 


THE   FUNDAMENTALS   OF   FICTION  9 

masterpieces  of  humorous  portraiture — "Chuzzle- 
wit/'  ^^Dombey,"  "Bleak  House/'  and  "Copper- 
field"  are  in  illustration — are  either  slight  or  loose- 
jointed  or  unconvincing  as  to  plot.  The 
story  in  which  above  all  others  he  tried  avowedly 
to  substitute  serious  incident  for  wealth  of  char- 
acterization, "The  Tale  of  Two  Cities,"  has  never 
ranked  among  his  major  performances.  "Great 
Expectations"  is  almost  his  only  book  of  which  it 
may  be  declared  that  a  well-conceived  fable  is  suc- 
cessfully handled.  Yet  Dickens  certainly  had  a 
feeling  for  plot.  It  would  be  more  accurate, 
therefore,  to  say  that  he  never  quite  gained  as- 
sured mastery  in  the  proper  manipulation  of  the 
story-strands.  "Little  Dorrit,"  for  example,  is  a 
comparative  failure,  not  so  much  because  its  seri- 
ous idea — the  fortunes  of  the  Dorrits  in  relation 
to  the  mystery  of  Mrs.  Clennam — fails  in  inter- 
est, as  because  the  ample  satiric  characterization, 
centering  around  the  Circumlocution  Office,  over- 
loads and  confuses  the  story.  This  great  writer 
was  too  rich  in  comic  inspiration  not  to  be  led  into 
digressions  and  all  sorts  of  fascinating  departures, 
complicating  the  movement  of  the  narrative,  but, 
at  the  same  time,  and  to  the  everlasting  advantage 
of  the  world  of  readers,  widening  the  field  of  ob- 
servation and  enriching  fiction  with  relishable 
pictures  of  humanity. 

With  Thackgray,  plot  is  always  secondary  and, 
for  the  most  part,  noticeably  slight.  So  true  is 
this  that,  assuming  incident  to  be  a  requisite  of 


10  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

the  novel,  "Vanity  Fair''  and  "Pendennis"  are 
hardly  to  be  called  novels  at  all;  being,  rather, 
satiric  social  sketches.  In  "Esmond,"  which  as 
an  historical  romance  demands  plot  more  than  his 
other  studies  of  life,  the  same  lack  is  easily 
recognized.  It  is  characterization  first,  last,  and 
all  the  time,  with  Thackeray.  Thousands  know 
Becky  Sharp  intimately  who  would  be  hard  put 
to  it  to  outline  the  plot  in  which  she  is  a  pro- 
tagonist. The  naturalness,  distinctness,  and  va- 
riety of  his  character-types  are  the  qualities 
which  claim  our  regard  and  admiration;  ^nd 
vastly  dissimilar  as  Dickens  is  from  his  great  fel- 
low of  the  earlier  Victorian  fiction,  much  the 
same  description  applies  to  him. 

In  point  of  style,  it  is  the  fashion  to  laud 
Thackeray  at  the  expense  of  the  other;  and  that, 
artist  against  artist,  the  preference  is  right  enough 
cannot  be  denied.  Dickens  was  always  an  unequal 
writer  of  English;  and  there  is  no  book  of  his 
which  as  a  whole  does  not  reveal  carelessnesses,  of 
which  Thackeray  was  seldom,  if  ever,  guilty. 
But,  I  would  venture  to  say,  the  contrast  has  been 
exaggerated.  He  of  Gadshill  commanded  a  dic- 
tion of  extraordinary  vigor  and  idiomatic  fresh- 
ness and  vivacity.  Why  should  we  not  see  it  and 
say  it?  With  a  natural  gift  for  expression,  his 
reading  in  his  youth  was  wonderfully  well  adapted 
to  future  results.  He  saturated  himself  with 
Eichardson,  Fielding,  and  Smollett,  with  Addison 
and  Steele.    It  gave  him  a  grip  on  the  vernacular. 


THE   FUNDAMENTALS   OF   FICTION        11 

which  grew  stronger  with  the  years.  He  wrote 
all  through  his  career  under  the  goad,  and  had 
the  demerits  of  the  hasty  producer;  but  to  speak 
as  if  Dickens  had  no  grace  or  force  of  diction — 
and  the  position  has  been  fashionable  of  late — is 
simply  nonsense.  He  often  surpasses  the  writer 
who  is  more  correct,  just  in  proportion  as  the 
idiomatic  is  more  precious  than  the  merely 
proper. 

The  only  other  major  novelist  of  the  Victorian 
mid-century,  George  EHot,  furnishes  further  food 
for  reflection,  'rhe  clear-eyed  and  sure-handed 
way  in  which  she  presents  the  middle-class  country 
types,  this  it  is  which  gives  her  so  unassailable  a 
place.  When  one  thinks  of  her  stories,  one  thinks 
perforce,  and  first  of  all,  of  her  personages,  men 
and  women — Silas,  Adam,  Hetty,  Mrs.  Poyser, 
Maggie  and  her  brother,  Dorothea  and  Causabon, 
Tito,  Deronda.  Such  other  valuable  adjuncts  as 
situation,  description,  style,  come  in  for  subse- 
quent appreciation;  but  it  is  this  great  woman's 
characters  who  arise  as  witnesses  to  her  art  and 
her  genius.  George  Eliot's  earlier  training  in  the 
ways  of  scholarship  and  her  inherent  proneness  to 
psychologic  philosophizing  could  not,  in  the  morn- 
ing blush  of  literary  creation,  quench  her  native 
gift  for  characterization.  N'or,  however  much  the 
former  encroached  upon  the  latter,  was  the  gift 
ever  disastrously  obscured  until  the  evening  day 
of  '^Theophrastus  Such."  The  tendency  was 
dangerous,  even  for  a  nature  of  her  calibre :  with 


12  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

a  lesser  writer  it  is  sure  to  make  trouble.  We  are 
observing  to-day  how  Mrs.  Humphrey  Ward  gains 
in  the  power  of  characterization  and,  in  fact,  in  all 
ways  as  an  artist,  by  so  much  as  she  eschews 
definite,  dogmatic  purpose.  The  parallel  is  es- 
pecially interesting,  because  in  some  prime  req- 
uisites— in  seriousness,  in  breadth  of  view,  in 
largeness  and  nobility  of  spirit — Mrs.  Ward, 
more  than  any  other  current  fictionist,  represents 
the  elder  woman.  In  the  author  of  "Marcella" 
the  loss  of  variety  and  strength  of  character- 
making,  although  in  part  a  personal  matter,  is 
due  in  some  measure  to  the  change  that  has  come 
over  our  literary  ideals. 

This  fact,  that  the  novelist  stands  or  falls  by 
characterization,  has  its  interesting  application 
when  we  come  to  look  at  later  novel-making.  It 
explains  the  relatively  limited  appeal  of  leaders 
cried  up  by  critics  whose  admiration  for  construc- 
tion, description,  and  style  make  them  forget  the 
preeminent  thing.  Of  course,  we  must  grant  that 
the  perfect  novel — ^like  the  perfect  man,  a  purely 
hypothetical  creature — "will  have  all  the  qualities 
in  due  proportion :  fresh  invention,  masterful  de- 
velopment, characters  that  live  and  move  and 
have  their  being,  description  full  of  picturesque- 
ness  and  power,  all  conveyed  in  a  diction  that  of 
itself  means  literature.  But,  humanly  speaking, 
this  is  the  unattainable  ideal  or,  at  least,  the  un- 
attained.  Conceding  this  much,  it  may  be  stated 
boldly  that  where  the  present-day  fictionist  fails 


THE   FUNDAMENTALS   OF   FICTION        13 

above  all  else  is  in  character — the  sign,  par  excel- 
lence, of  the  creator.  A  few  years  ago  it  would 
have  been  in  consonance  with  the  facts  to  say  that 
he  was  weak  in  invention  as  well.  But  now,  with 
romances  appearing  daily,  and  startling  plots  in 
the  very  air  one  breathes,  this  lack  is  less  felt. 
But  character-making,  yes.  Nor  can  the  blame 
justly  be  laid  on  the  public,  which  is  always  eager 
to  welcome  a  piece  of  veritable  character-lim- 
ning. 

As  I  write,  "David  Harum"  is  the  best  selling 
story — and  therefore  book,  since  fiction  still  has 
a  corner  on  literature.  Why  is  this?  Because  it 
contains  one  thoroughly  racy  and  enjoyable  char- 
acter ;  the  rest  is  naught.  The  book  is  not  a  novel. 
It  has  no  plot  worth  mentioning,  and  but  little 
construction;  being  a  purely  conventional  treat- 
ment of  the  love-motif.  The  nominal  hero's  only 
mortal  use  is,  that  Uncle  David  may  have  some 
one  to  talk  to  steadily.  But  the  tale  has  a  bona 
fide  creation  in  David  himself ;  and  this  is  enough 
to  give  it  a  remarkable  and  deserved  popularity. 
Yet  reflect  a  moment  that  there  is  not  even  a 
second-rate  novel  by  Dickens  which  does  not  con- 
tain, I  will  not  say  one,  but  half  a  dozen,  humor- 
ous character-types,  any  one  of  which  might  be 
named  as  an  offset  to  the  shrewd,  kindly  horse- 
trader  and  country  banker.  This  is  not  said  in 
the  spirit  of  detraction,  but  merely  to  bring  home 
the  thought  that  we  have  fallen  on  a  paucity  of 
real  character-creation,  which  results  in  an  almost 


14  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

pathetically  cordial  reception  for  it  when  a 
modicum  of  it  is  proffered. 

Nor  is  it  Jingoism,  by  the  way,  to  remark  that 
the  introduction  of  some  of  the  Southern  and 
Western  types  so  saliently  depicted  by  younger 
American  novelists — Page  and  Harris,  Stuart, 
Thanet,  Wister,  Garland,  Chopin,  Fernald,  and 
others — is  as  hopeful  a  sign  as  current  fiction  can 
show,  and  one  hardly  to  be  paralleled  in  England. 
In  the  earlier  days  Bret  Harte  took  a  unique 
place  because  of  this  same  power,  albeit  not  always 
used  aright.  Who,  let  us  inquire,  are  the  living 
personages  in  the  stories  of  Henry  James? 
Verily,  since  the  days  of  ^The  American,"  the 
best  in  this  kind  are  but  shadows.  Stevenson,  ad- 
mirable in  the  other  cardinal  points  of  invention, 
construction,  and  a  style  that  sets  him  apart  from 
his  contemporaries,  has  also  thrown  out  upon  the 
fictional  canvas  a  few  figures  which  are  distinct 
— Alan  Breck,  David  Balfour,  both  the  Bal- 
lantraes,  Kirstie  the  elder,  and  quite  a  portrait- 
gallery  of  rascals  the  most  firm-bodied  and  pictur- 
esque in  the  novel-writing  of  our  time. 

Can  as  much  be  said  for  Kipling  ?  Very  strong 
he  is,  of  a  truth,  in  invention,  construction,  de- 
scription, and  dialogue;  but  where  are  his  char- 
acters? Outside  of  Mowgli  and  the  Soldiers 
Three,  has  he  given  us  any?  An  obvious  answer 
is,  that  being  primarily  a  short-story  maker,  he 
is,  by  the  definition  of  his  art,  excluded  from 
triumphs  in  this  kind,  since  characterization  re- 


THE   FUNDAMElfTAL8    OF   FICTION        15 

quires  a  larger  canvas.  There  is  something  in 
this;  but  it  does  not  affect  the  main  proposition 
that  Kipling's  forte,  thus  far,  has  not  been  the 
delineation  of  personality.  That  he  has  been  able, 
within  short-story  limits,  to  stamp  Mulvaney  and 
his  commensals  with  so  much  individuality  speaks 
volumes  for  his  natural  abilities  in  a  perilous  en- 
deavor. Nevertheless,  having  in  view  the  num- 
ber of  his  volumes  and  the  striking  effects  he  has 
produced,  it  is  worth  noting  that  Kipling's  con- 
tribution to  fictional  portraiture  has  not  been 
large. 

It  is  curious,  and  a  bit  amusing,  to  see  how  cur- 
rent novels  are  heralded  with  trumpets  of 
prophecy  and  followed  by  columnar  eulogies, 
when,  in  this  article  of  character  truly  alive,  they 
are  nil.  An  example  of  this  class — ^not  a  small 
one — just  now  is  Theodore  Watts  Dunton's 
"Aylwin."  Undoubtedly,  the  story  has  romantic 
poetry  in  it  of  a  strained,  fantastic,  and  morbid 
kind.  But,  in  respect  of  characterization,  surely 
it  is  a  failure.  Eevert  in  memory  to  such  a  hum- 
drum realist  as  Anthony  Trollope,  in  order  vividly 
to  realize  why  that  fiction-iliaker,  whose  class  is 
confessedly  not  the  first,  is  likely  to  keep  his 
place  in  the  suffrages  of  a  large,  and  not  undis- 
tinguished, constituency.  The  folk  of  the  "Bar- 
chester  Chronicles"  may  be  commonplace  and  un- 
exciting; but  they  are  verifiable  and  cling  to  the 
mind. 

This  clear  bodying  forth  of  men  and  women  in 


16  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

the  novel  sets  up  so  good  a  claim  to  attention 
that  it  will  often  cover  a  mnltitnde  of  sins.  And 
it  really  seems  as  if,  with  the  rapidly  increasing 
skill  in  the  other  technical  points  of  novelistic 
art,  this  potent,  this  supreme  power  of  characteri- 
zation were  in  danger  of  its  life.  Is  it  that  our 
story-tellers  lack  gift,  genius,  or  simply  that,  in 
the  care  spent  upon  analysis  or  construction,  de- 
scription or  style,  or  all  of  them,  they  have  lost 
sight  of  the  most  vital  element  in  any  and  all 
fiction  ?  Or  is  it  again — very  plausible  this — ^that 
problem  and  principle  have  led  our  fictionists 
somewhat  away  from  the  straight-away  actions  of 
flesh-and-blood  folk?  The  pessimist  will  incline 
toward  the  easy  solution,  concluding  that  it  is  all 
a  question  of  ability ;  that  we  have  fallen  on  little 
days,  if  not  evil ;  that  when  the  gods  go,  the  half- 
gods  arrive.  Genius  was  of  yore:  now  is  the 
time  of  carefully  cultivated  talents.  But  the  stu- 
dent of  social  history,  and  literature  in  its  rela- 
tion thereto,  will  prefer  to  see  in  the  wonderful 
development  of  the  art  of  fiction  during  the  last 
quarter-century  a  more  essential  cause  for  the 
temporary  abeyance  in  the  power  of  creating 
salient,  unforgettable  characters.  I  say  ^^tempo- 
rary," as  expressing  the  belief  that,  just  as  we  have 
witnessed  a  distinct  reaction  from  the  plotless  tale 
of  psychologic  analysis  towaM  stories  of  incident 
and  action,  so  we  are  likely  to  see  a  return  to  the 
old  emphasis  on  character. 

The  folk  of  fiction  in  the  future  will  not  be  so 


THE   FUNDAMENTALS   OF   FICTION        17 

much  pegs  to  hang  theories  upon,  as  human  beings 
to  associate  with,  to  laugh  and  cry  with,  and  to 
part  from  right  unwillingly.  And  they  will  be 
more  wholesome  company  withal  than  they  have 
been,  as  a  rule,  of  late.  Novelists  must  so  realize 
their  characters  that  the  bidding  them  good-bye 
means  pain  and  loss  to  the  writers  themselves — as 
Dickens  walked  the  streets  of  Paris  the  best  part 
of  one  night  in  utter  misery  because  little  Paul 
Dombey  had  fallen  on  final  sleep;  or  as  Daudet 
was  overcome  when  he  had  similar  experience  with 
his  lad  of  the  imagination,  the  Piteous  Jack. 
The  inexorable  corollary  to  such  feeling  on  the 
side  of  the  creator  is  an  affectionate  faith  in  those 
characters  on  the  side  of  the  world  of  novel- 
readers.  Let  this  not  be  forgotten  in  a  day  of  the 
deification  of  technic  and  of  an  overweening  de- 
sire to  handicap  the  personages  of  fiction  by  mak- 
ing them  more  or  less  colorless  exponents  of  a 
principle,  a  class,  or  a  theory. 

By  the  knowing  novelist  of  to-day  the  exposure 
of  himself  as  caring  vitally  whether  his  manikins 
live  or  die  is  something  to  be  avoided — even 
sneered  at  in  others.  Such  an  attitude  is  declared 
to  be  naive,  inartistic.  This  is  an  ominous  sign. 
Charles  Eeade,  weeping  over  the  parting  with 
^Teg  Woffington" — ^^my  darling,"  he  called  her — 
is  a  far  more  convincing  spectacle  to  a  host  of 
honest-hearted  readers,  than  is  that  of  Thackeray 
at  the  end  of  the  "Newcomes''  ringing  down  the 
curtain  and  putting  his  puppets  ia  the  box — in 


18  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

other  words,  smashing  all  the  illusion  of  the  tale 
by  announcing  in  the  first  person  its  Active  na- 
ture. The  cold,  aloof  position  of  the  late-century 
fiction-maker  toward  the  people  of  his  brain  and 
heart  may  be  high  art,  but  it  is  precious  poor 
humanity.  And  it  is  this  perhaps  more  than  any 
other  one  thing  that  is  likely  to  keep  out  of  our 
fiction  the  red  blood  of  life.  ^^But,"  cries  the 
novelist,  ^T^ook  at  my  skill,  my  ingenuity,  my 
technical  excellences  in  half  a  dozen  particulars 
of  a  difficult  art."  To  which  the  public  replies: 
"True,  it  is  magnificent,  but  it  is  not  war." 


THE  CULT  OF  THE  HISTORICAL 
ROMANCE. 

There  is  much  to  justify  the  remark  that  litera- 
ture, like  life,  has  its  ephemeral  fashions.  A  long 
yesterday  ago,  the  epic  was  the  favorite  form  of 
narration;  later,  the  drama  ruled;  to-day,  the 
novel  is  supreme.  And  within  the  limits  marked 
out  for  that  wide  term,  fiction,  the  variations  in 
the  kind  of  story  are  so  many  and  apparently  so 
arbitrary  that  they  may  seem,  on  a  superficial 
glance,  to  depend  upon  incalculable  social  whims 
and  vagaries.  Indeed,  we  may  go  further  and 
concede  to  this  view,  that,  from  decade  to  decade, 
certain  elements  of  fashion  do  influence  literary 
matters  with  the  result  that,  in  the  case  of  an  au- 
thor (and  the  same  is  true  of  a  literary  form),  he 
attracts  a  following,  only  to  be  set  aside  ere  long 
for  some  newer  interest.  Nevertheless,  the  idea 
that  fashion  controls  literature,  as  it  does  woman's 
dress,  for  example,  is  one  based  upon  specious  ap- 
pearances ;  it  ignores  underlying  causes  which,  in 
reality,  define  literary  evolution. 

Psychologic  laws  and  sociologic  conditions  ex- 
plain shifts  of  taste  which,  superficially  con- 
sidered, seem  as  unpredicable  as  the  desire  of  a 
coquette.  Thus,  taking  the  literary  forms  just 
mentioned,  a  certain  stage  of  civilization  demands 

19 


/ 


\ 


20  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

that  its  stories  be  poured  into  the  majestic  mold 
of  the  epic;  an  age  more  sophisticate,  with  a 
keener  sense  of  national  life  and  a  greater  soli- 
darity, possessing  what  may  be  called  a  practical 
bias  for  action,  favors  the  play;  while  our  own 
time,  with  its  tremendously  complex  social  needs 
and  interrelations,  finds  in  prose  fiction,  so  flexible 
in  form,  so  all-embracing  in  theme,  its  natural 
outlet  of  expression.  This  single  fact,  that  our 
day  has  elected  the  novel  as  its  representative 
form,  may  be  regarded  in  two  ways;  it  may  be 
taken  simply  as  a  sign  of  the  shallowness  and 
lightheadedness  of  these  latter  years,  an  indica- 
tion of  degeneracy,  or  it  may  be  studied  as 
revelatory  of  the  aims  and  ideals  of  the  time,  and 
hence  full  of  interesting  suggestions.  The  former 
is  the  conclusion  of  the  unthinking  hasty;  the 
latter,  that  of  the  scholar. 

But,  now,  what  is  true  of  the  different  forms, 
is  true  of  fiction  in  its  several  sorts.  Plainly 
marked  changes  have  taken  place  during  the  past 
century  (to  go  no  further  back)  with  a  compara- 
tive regularity  which  a  glance  at  literary  history 
will  make  apparent. 

Scott,  by  right  of  power,  introduced  the  modern 
historical  romance.  He  stamped  this  kind  with 
the  seal  of  his  genius,  although  romanticism  in 
the  novel  was  living  no  feeble  life  before  him.  In 
fact,  the  story  of  romantic  quality  was  creeping 
and  spreading  like  a  prairie  fire  all  along  the 
second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  but  we  do 


THE   CULT  OF  HISTORICAL  ROMANCE    21 

not  feel  its  heat  until  the  genial  influence  of  the 
Waverley  Master.  This  roman^ier'unpulse  and 
direction  had  by  the  year  1850  become  a  thing 
obsolete  and  only  sporadically  cultivated.  G.  P. 
E.  James,  whose  array  of  Christian  names  has  the 
effect  of  suggesting  the  too  leisurely  movement  of 
his  many  romances,  did  more  than  his  share,  per- 
haps, in  checking  the  taste  for  this  kind  of  story- 
writing.  By  the  middle  century  Dickens  and 
Thackeray  had  returned  to  the  method  of  Eich- 
ardson  and  Fielding  and  Smollett;  the  novel  of 
analysis,  depicting  contemporary  manners  and 
types,  was  again  in  full  vogue.  This  counter- 
swing  of  the  pendulum  brought  on  the  noteworthy 
development  conveniently  (though  misleadingly) 
summarized  under  the  familiar  term  "realism.'^ 
With  this  extension  of  the  fictionist's  field,  came 
an  increased  desire  for  accuracy  and  what  is  called 
truth;  and  too  often  this  truth  was  of  the  ex- 
clusively factual  sort,  that  which  deals  with  visible 
phenomena  or  with  scientific  laws;  or  worse,  it 
came  to  mean  an  insistence  upon  the  grosser  de- 
tails of  the  life  sensual.  This  instinct  for  particu- 
larity and  verity  had,  however,  its  legitimate  man- 
ifestations, and  did  great  service  in  rubbing 
bright  the  mirror  of  the  novel,  so  that  it  might 
reflect  without  distortion  the  image  of  the  time. 
The  importance  as  well  as  dominance  of  the  so- 
called  realistic  movement  during  the  past  five-and- 
twenty  years  can  hardly  be  overrated.  The  critic 
cannot  quarrel  with  the  statement  that  it  repre- 


22  FORGES   IN   FICTION 

sents  fiction's  most  characteristic  evolution  in  the 
century's  last  quarter.  What  other  tendency  has 
been  so  widespread  and  influential — the  influence 
amounting  to  a  revolution  of  method,  aim,  and 
interpretation  ? 

Yet  the  very  insistence  upon  analysis  and  detail 
self-doomed  it  to  suffer  a  reaction.  The  romantic 
revival  of  the  past  decade  draws  attention  to  the 
inevitable  swing-back  of  the  pendulum,  a  move- 
ment away  from  the  realistic  and  towards  the  ro- 
mantic, and  freshly  emphasizes  for  the  scholar 
the  laws  by  which  fiction  in  its  historic  growth 
shifts  from  one  to  the  other  of  these  two  main 
purposes.  Keeping  to  the  figure  of  the  pendulum, 
we  might  say  that  the  arc  described  has  for  its 
two  limits,  realism,  the  desire  for  truth,  and  ro- 
manticism, the  desire  for  poetry.  Quite  as  truly 
as  in  the  physical  world,  a  swing  one  way  implies 
a  swing  the  other,  and  corresponding  to  the 
central  pull  of  gravity  is  that  same  instinct  of 
normal  human  nature,  drawing  the  novel  back'  to 
a  middle  point  of  art.  Thus,  in  a  sense,  scientific 
laws  of  ebb  and  flow  control  the  changes  in  this 
typical  modern  literary  form.  And  hence  the 
present  marked  popularity  of  romantic  narrative 
is  a  phase  which  one  with  his  eye  on  the  evolution 
of  fiction  since  Scott  could  have  predicated  with 
little  trouble. 

Our  opinion  of  the  momentary  cult  of  the  ro- 
mance will  be  modified  in  the  first  place  by  our 
attitude  towards  the  romantic  as  a  method,  and 


THE   CULT  OF  HISTORICAL  ROMANCE    23 

in  the  last  by  our  estimate  of  the  quality  of  the 
work  at  present  being  done  under  that  banner-cry. 
As  to  the  former,  it  seems  fair  to  say  that  if  by  ro- 
mance we  mean  the  truthful  handling  of  the  more 
exceptional  and  noble  incidents  and  characters  in 
life,  in  such  wise  as  not  to  imply  that  they  are 
more  frequent  in  occurrence  than  in  reality  they 
are,  the  romantic  is  a  welcome  visitor.  Certainly 
it  is  inspiring  to  meet  people  in  fiction  who  ex- 
emplify the  finer  traits  of  humanity,  and  to  be 
introduced  to  situations  which  stir  the  soul  out 
of  the  walking  trance  of  everyday  existence.  Nor 
is  there  any  harm  in  it,  along  with  the  good,  un- 
less life  and  the  folk  thereof  are  treated  with  a 
certain  sickly  pseudo-idealism  which  makes  the 
world  an  impossible  phantasmagoria,  and  its  men 
and  women  to  appear  like  the  philosopher's  trees 
walking.  To  condemn  that  sort  of  fictional  nar- 
cotic is  not  to  condemn  the  true  romance:  ab 
dbusu  ad  usum  non  valet  consequentia.  The  critic 
may  well  cry  up  the  nobler  order  of  romance 
which  includes  the  right  kind  of  realism,  because 
it  tells  the  truth  about  the  most  interesting  and 
uplifting  aspects  of  human  life,  while  it  does  not 
fall  into  the  error  of  putting  too  much  stress  upon 
the  lower  stages  of  the  slow  painful  process  by 
which  man  mounts  to  higher  things. 

But  now  as  to  the  product  itself,  which  in  these 
latter  days  is  put  out  so  generously,  stamped  with 
the  promiseful  trade-mark,  Komanticism.  That 
there  is  much  good  in  it,  only  the  confirmed  cynic 


24  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

will  deny.  Three  roads  it  takes;  that  of  the 
pastoral  idyl,  that  of  the  modern  adventure-tale, 
and  that  of  the  historical  romance.  And  the  most 
notable  results  just  now  seem  to  come  by  this  last- 
named  way.  In  England  the  young  romantics  led 
by  Stevenson,  with  such  doughty  lieutenants  as 
Doyle,  Hope,  Weyman,  Barrie  and  Quiller-Couch, 
with  later  writers  of  whom  Hewlett  is  typical, 
come  to  mind.  To  these  and  others  of  their  faith 
the  ^^fair  field  of  old  romance"  has  been  attractive 
and  yielded  golden  fruit  in  two  senses — the 
artistic  and  the  mercantile.  Stimulated  by  their 
example,  American  writers  have  waked  up  to  a 
realization  of  the  rich  historic  material  native  to 
their  own  land;  and  major  attempts  like  Dr. 
Mitchell's  ''Hugh  Wynne,''  Mr.  Stimson's  "King 
:tToanett,"  Mr.  Allen's  "The  Choir  Invisible"  and 
"The  Eeign  of  Law,"  Mr.  Churchill's  "Richard 
Carvel,"  Mr.  Ford's  "Janice  Meredith,"  Miss 
Jewett's  "A  Tory  Lover,"  and  Miss  Johnston's 
"To  Have  and  to  Hold,"  are  only  a  few  among  a 
less  conspicuous  many. 

Most  of  these  books  are  welcome  both  as  a  con- 
tribution to  native  history  and  as  an  extension  of 
the  individual  outlook  upon  life ;  they  have  suffi- 
cient art,  truth  and  power  to  justify  their  appear- 
ance. The  warmth  of  their  reception,  indeed,  while 
it  may  be  explained  in  part  by  saying  that  the  pub- 
lic, starved  for  years,  was  ahungered  for  imagina- 
tive presentation  of  any  sort,  means  quite  as  truly 
that  such  like  novels  have  genuine  merit.  The  sue- 


k 


THE   CULT  OF  HISTORICAL  ROMANCE    26 

cesses  of  the  moment  are  mostly  in  this  line;  not 
exclusively — witness  the  merry  sale  of  "David 
Harum/' — but  so  prevailingly  that  the  phrase,  a 
romantic  cult,  as  applied  to  the  present  situation, 
is  not  inaccurately  descriptive. 

And  the  inevitable  result  is  at  hand.  Second- 
rate  writers  are  turning  to  the  historic  romance, 
not  because  they  are  compelled  from  within  to  do 
so,  but  rather  because  they  strive  to  meet  an 
obvious  demand;  their  impulse  is  mercantile,  not 
artistic.  The  market  is  in  danger  of  being  flooded 
with  spurious  imitations  of  the  real  article.  Not 
a  few  fiction-fashioners  are  serving  not  Scott  but 
Mammon.  Several  current  stories  are  far  from 
being  finished  works  of  art,  nor  indeed  do  they 
show  sufficient  power  or  skill,  one  would  suppose, 
to  justify  their  vogue;  yet  how  wide  an  audience 
have  they  found!  Such  diet  cannot  be  peptonic 
in  the  long  run ;  its  careless  acceptance  will  speed 
the  day  of  the  return  of  an  exaggerated  realism. 
It  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that  in  the  present 
year  of  grace  the  general  public  is  fairly  rabid  for 
heroic  stories  of  the  past.  Publishers  are  suggest- 
ing historic  themes  to  novelists,  who,  on  their  side, 
are  grubbing  in  old  records  and  furbishing  up 
their  memories  of  bygone  centuries  and  countries. 
Booksellers  buy  their  wares,  keenly  cognizant  of 
this  popular  appeal.  The  proprietor  of  the  lead- 
ing book-shop  in  a  large  Western  city  was  filling 
his  front  window  one  morning  with  Ford's  "Janice 
Meredith,^^  just  then  hot  from  the  press ;  and  upon 


26  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

my  expressing  a  mild  doubt  as  to  his  getting  rid 
of  so  many  copies,  replied  briskly  that  the  more 
probable  trouble  would  be  to  keep  the  story  in 
stock.  This  was  not  faith  without  works,  to  be 
sure,  for  Mr.  Ford  is  a  popular  novelist ;  but  the 
fact  that  the  book  in  question  was  an  historic  ro- 
mance, and  of  American  motive  at  that,  furnished 
the  extra  weight  to  turn  the  scales.  Had  the  fic- 
tion been  of  the  more  psychologic  sort  my  book- 
seller's voice  had  not  sounded  with  such  a  chirrup 
of  confidence.  And  in  justification  of  his  judg- 
ment, in  the  first  week's  sale  thirteen  thousand 
copies  of  the  book  went  off,  and  its  subsequent 
fortune  has  been  of  like  kind. 

Now  one  may  admire  the  historical  romance  in 
its  place  and  degree,  and  yet  deprecate  the  tend- 
ency to  laud  romance  for  romance's  sake.  For  this 
last  attitude  brings  about  the  circulation  of  much 
that  is  mediocre,  if  not  worthless;  it  holds  back 
the  true  development  of  fictional  art;  it  tends  to 
a  partizan  patronage  of  the  part  rather  than  the 
whole ;  and,  as  already  hinted,  it  is  very  likely  to 
precipitate  a  reactionary  devotion  to  the  narrow 
realism  from  which  there  would  seem  to  be  a 
happy  escape.  One's  very  dislike  of  this  stupid, 
vulgar  abuse  of  fiction  inclines  one  to  cry  a  halt 
on  the  present  uncritical  deification,  of  the  so- 
called  romantic.  Nor,  frankly,  does  the  romance 
give  the  full  picture.  To  lay  the  scenes  of  a  novel 
in  older  times  is  no  warrant  that  it  will  be  either 
artistic  or  readable. 


THE   CULT  OF  HISTORICAL  ROMANCE    27 

From  the  very  nature  of  the  historical  romance 
the  danger  of  missing  the  right  method  is 
peculiarly  strong.  An  effective  romance  must 
possess^  over  and  above  its  verisimilitude^  the  re- 
production of  bygone  speech,  manners,  and  char- 
acter types,  those  elemental  human  qualities 
which  shall  make  it  interesting,  expressive.  This 
quality  it  is  which  gives  Scott  earlier  and  Sien- 
kiewicz  later  a  claim  upon  the  world  of  readers, 
critical  and  general.  To  secure  this  result  has,  I 
say,  difficulties  exceptional  and  only  to  be  over- 
come by  a  life-work.  To  appeal  through 
piquancy  of  costuming  or  the  unhackneyed  nature 
of  the  situations  is  legitimate  enough ;  but  this  is 
subordinate  to  that  essential  humanity  in  a  ro- 
mance which  forces  the  thoughtful  to  call  it  finely 
representative. 

While  I  cannot  go  so  far  as  Professor  Brander 
[Matthews,  who  believes  that  it  is  this  alone  which 
makes  the  historical  story  survive  its  own  day, 
the  local  color  and  the  illusion  of  the  past  being 
largely  unknown,  since  no  man  really  knows  a 
former  century,  I  do  agree  with  him  heartily  in 
the  primary  necessity  that  fiction  of  this  sort  shall 
show  the  abiding  interests  and  passions.  Pan 
Michel  may  be  honestly  Slavonic  as  to  type,  but 
it  is  the  more  important  fact  that  he  is  a  child- 
hearted  lover  and  hero-patriot  which  brings  all 
nations  to  his  death-scene.  Mr.  Frederick  Har- 
rison, himself  a  historian,  concedes  to  the  writer 
of  historical  romance  the  opportunity  of  what  he 


28  FORGES   IN   FICTION 

calls  'historic  realism/^  a  phrase  lie  uses  in  re- 
gard to  "Eichard  Yea  and  Nay/'  It  would  seem 
true  that,  in  a  sense,  the  very  perfection  of  the 
illusion  in  a  picture  of  past  times  constitutes  its 
claim  to  realism — a  reality  which  neither  reader 
nor  writer  can  ever  prove  at  first  hand  nor  even 
by  documentary  evidence. 

A  further  thought  forces  itself  upon  us  here. 
Eomantic  literature,  to  be  honest,  must  stand  for 
the  romantic  spirit  of  the  age  that  produces  it; 
otherwise  it  is  felt  to  be  pastiche,  an  imitation, 
not  a  reality.  Is  our  age,  in  truth,  one  that  finds 
its  deepest,  most  sympathetic  expression  in  the 
historical  novel?  On  the  contrary,  is  it  not  the 
strong,  fine,  truthful  representation  of  present- 
day  vital  issues  which  most  appeals  to  the  largest 
number  of  educated  readers?  The  question  may 
at  least  be  asked.  If  so  it  is,  then  the  current 
craze  for  the  romance  has  no  firm  rootage,  and 
another  reason  for  its  probable  brief  cultivation  is 
found.  Prof.  W.  P.  Trent,  in  a  recent  suggestive 
paper,  goes  so  far  as  to  say  that  ^'there  is  no 
genuine  spirit  of  romanticism  abroad  to-day;" 
which  is  a  more  sweeping  assertion  than  those  of 
us  who  believe  that  the  interest  in  romance  is  in  a 
sense  eternal  would  care  to  make.  IN'evertheless, 
it  may  be  argued  with  much  show  of  reason  that 
the  modern  attitude  of  mind  after  a  half  century 
of  science,  expressed  in  the  august  word  Evolution, 
and  after  so  thorough  an  indoctrination  in  the 
idea  that  the  novel's  chief  business  is  to  depict  life 


THE   CULT  OF  HISTORICAL  ROMANCE    29 

as  it  iS;,  for  our  instruction,  cannot  quite  go  back 
to  the  old  dissipation  in  the  not  seldom  noxious 
sweets  of  romantic  illusion  or  delusion. 

Certain  evils,  then,  are  possible  to  the  enthu- 
siasm for  historic  romance,  and  it  is  perhaps  as 
well  to  draw  attention  to  them  just  at  the  point 
when,  in  the  "first  fine  careless  rapture'^  of  ap- 
preciation, the  critical  faculty  may  be  lulled  to 
sleep.  Let  us  have  the  romance  of  the  larger, 
nobler  kind,  by  all  means;  but  let  us  sternly  re- 
fuse to  read  history  fiction  that  is  neither  sound 
history  nor  good  fiction.  In  our  relish  for  the 
(perfectly  admissible)  presentation  of  heroics 
(within  limits  which  should  be  definitely  under- 
stood), let  us  not  overlook  the  admirable  work 
steadily  being  done  in  the  United  States,  as  else- 
where, in  the  vast  and  varied  fields  of  sane  real- 
ism. If  we  would  not  witness  a  woful  return  to 
realism  of  the  baser  sort,  we  must  take  care  not  to 
get  a  surfeit  even  of  a  good  thing.  The  teaching 
of  literary  history  here  is  so  plain  that  he  who 
runs  may  read. 

The  present  taste  for  romance,  natural  and 
wholesome  as  it  is,  does  not  necessarily  mean  a 
permanent  triumph  of  that  particular  tendency; 
in  fact,  to  believe  it  did,  were  to  make  light  of  the 
lesson  taught  by  the  historic  life  of  fiction  since 
the  year  1814,  when  the  Waverley  Novels  began  to 
bewitch  the  imaginations  of  men.  Just  because  of 
the  vigor  of  its  romantic  impulse  will  the  pendu- 
lum  swing   back   toward   realism;    and   it   lies 


30  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

primarily  with  the  intelligent  reading  public 
whether  the  counter  movement  is  not  excessive, 
producing  once  again  in  current  novels  the  petty 
particularity,  the  dreary  lack  of  incident,  the  at- 
tention to  malodorous  material,  and  the  waspish 
interpretation  of  life,  which,  in  various  combina- 
tions, are  associated  in  many  minds  with  the  hard- 
ridden  word,  realism. 


THE  LOVE  MOTIVE  IN  MODEEN 
FICTION 

It  may  be  said  that  of  old  a  story  in  fiction  of 
the  English  tongue  meant  a  love  story.  This  is  a 
generalization  that  the  memories  of  novel  readers 
of  an  elder  generation  will  justify.  As  love  is  the 
central  fact  and  solar  force  in  the  life  of  man  as 
he  emerges  from  the  brute;  so,  naturally,  it  was 
given  the  role  of  protagonist  in  the  human  passion 
play.  'Tiove,"  says  Mr.  Howells  in  a  recent  piece  ^y^ 
of  fiction,  "has  to  be  in  every  picture  of  life,  as  it 
has  to  be  in  every  life." 

Peter  Bayne,  in  1860,  defined  the  novel  as^  a 
"domestic  history"  in  which  the  incidents  and 
evolution  centered  in  the  amatory  passion.  Even 
present  day  dictionaries  emphasize  the  love  theme, 
in  describing  fiction.  In  the  fiction  of  the  eight- 
eenth century  the  love  depicted  was,  take  it  by 
and  large,  stilted,  narrow  and  unideal.  But  it 
played  a  very  important  role,  nevertheless, 
whether  it  was  handled  in  its  coarser  manifesta- 
tions by  a  Fielding  or  treated  with  the  compara- 
tively prim  propriety  of  a  Jane  Austen. 

The  novel,  then,  of  all  present  literary  forms 
most  reflective  of  modern  society,  has  mirrored  the  ^ 

thoughts,  feelings  and  acts  connected  with  love  to 
the  exclusion,  or,   at  least,  to  the  comparative 
31 


32  FORGES   IN   FICTION 

neglect,  of  other  social  motor  forces.  But  in  the 
remarkable  development  of  fiction  which  has 
taken  place  during  the  past  quarter-century — a 
movement  beginning  to  crystallize  into  definite 
results  with  Zola  at  the  time  of  the  Franco-Prus- 
sian war,  a  change  is  to  be  chronicled  in  the 
handling  and  valuation  of  the  love-motive  and 
its  successive  stages.  The  result  has  suggestion 
and  interest  not  only  for  its  bearings  on  modem 
fiction  but  also  on  the  life  such  literature  portrays. 
In  the  treatment  of  love  in  the  old-fashioned 
''goody-good/'  story  of  English  manufacture 
earlier  in  our  century,  that  passion  was  regarded 
as  fitly  interpreted  by  two  young  folk  of  opposite 
sex  in  the  pre-nuptial  period ;  under  proper  social 
restrictions  they  met,  were  attracted,  wooing  and 
winning  followed  in  due  course  and  the  novelist's 
duty  was  done  when  he  had  effected  a  happy  cul- 
mination at  the  altar — a  word  to  which  the  later, 
more  cynical  exponent  of  fiction  prefixes  the  let- 
ter h.  "And  so  they  were  married  and  lived  hap- 
pily forever  after,"  is  the  fairy-tale  phrase  drop- 
ping the  curtain  upon  this  tame  denouement.  I 
am  aware  that  this  is  a  sweeping  statement,  that 
older  English  fiction  sometimes  treats  the  love 
motive  more  robustly.  The  amatory  relations  of 
Mr.  B.  and  Pamela,  the  gallantries  of  Tom  Jones 
appear  vigorous  and  sufficiently  unconventional 
when  set  over  against  these  milk-and-water  epi- 
sodes. But  the  run  of  stories  prior  to  the  incom- 
ing of  realism  was  of  the  sort  indicated;  the  ex- 


LOVE   MOTIVE   IN  MODERN   FICTION      33 

perience  of  veteran  novel  readers  will  sustain  me. 
The  foreign  novelists  and  critics  made  fun  of  the 
English  for  this  tendency. 

Gradually,  however,  and  no  doubt  under  foreign 
influence,  came  a  bolder  handling,  a  wider  ex- 
tension of  the  theme.  Love  began  to  be  recognized 
as  an  explosive  capable  of  tearing  people  to  pieces ; 
a  power  productive  of  unhappiness  along  with 
felicity.  Shakespeare's  '^The  course  of  true  love 
never  did  run  smooth,''  became  a  motto  for  tales 
in  which  many  obstacles  to  the  eventual  pleasant 
round-up  in  church  were  imagined,  and  men  and 
maidens  not  only  loved,  but  misunderstood,  quar- 
reled, and  lost  or  went  astray.  These  narratives 
were  more  or  less  sad,  but  not  necessarily  pessi- 
mistic; they  marked  a  step  away  from  the  stereo- 
typed "good  ending"  of  the  primitive  love-tale. 
But  sentimental  they  were  to  the  lachrymosal  pitch 
of  a  Mackenzie.  And  they  testify  to  a  broaden- 
ing conception  of  life  in  one  of  its  most  vital  as- 
pects; life  as  compounded  of  bitter  and  sweet  in 
uncertain  shifting  proportions,  and  not  as  con- 
tinuously saccharine.  This  sad  ending  became  in 
time  as  conventional  as  the  earlier  happy  ending. 
The  ladies  who  wept  over  Richardson's  "Clarissa 
Harlowe"  and  knelt  imploring  the  novelist  to  spare 
their  beloved  heroine's  life,  were  evidently  less 
inured  to  fictional  pain  than  their  novel-reading 
descendants. 

Then  came  another  extension  of  subject.  It 
occurred  to  those  who  narrate  imagined  deeds  that 


34  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

to  stop  at  marriage  was  unfair  and  absurd;  an 
arbitrary  halt  at  a  mid-station  of  the  life  journey, 
when  stirring  haps  and  mishaps  lay  beyond.  So, 
with  the  French  as  leaders,  enters  the  whole  brood 
of  fiction  dealing  with  marital  relations  and  an- 
swerable for  so  much  that  is  malodorous,  but  also 
for  a  great  deal  that  is  strong  and  fine.  Here  such 
names  as  Hardy,  Meredith  and  Moore,  Tolstoy, 
Flaubert, ,  Zola  and  Daudet,  Sudermann  and 
Bjornson,  D'Annunzio,  Valera  and  Bazan,  come 
to  mind  as  representative,  standing  for  many 
others.  Main  attention  came  to  be  given  to  post- 
marital  experiences.  The  novelists  were  fain  to 
illustrate  the  homely  saying,  ^^hen  a  man  mar- 
ries his  trouble  begins/'  and  the  miseries  of  the 
mismated  were  set  forth  in  epic  sweep.  And  by 
an  inevitable  farther  step,  the  relations  of  im- 
propriety— the  French  ^^drame  a  trois'* — have  been 
delineated  with  a  gusto  and  particularity  which 
have  left  little  to  be  hoped  for, — or  dreaded. 

It  is  as  natural  for  George  Meredith  or  Thomas 
Hardy  or  George  Moore  to  show  the  tragedies  of 
unconventional  sex  relations  as  it  was  for  Dickens 
to  sum  up  those  of  the  oppressed  poor  or  Thack- 
eray to  describe  family  embroglios.  Thus,  in  a 
progressive  treatment  of  love  happy,  love  un- 
happy, love  sensual  and  love  of  the  union  litre 
type,  the  later  novelists,  outside  of  our  language 
most  noticeably,  but  within  it  to  an  appreciable 
degree,  have  moved  away  from  the  quaint  and 
comfortable  depictment  of  the  pretty  boy-and-girl 


LOVE   MOTIVE   IN   MODERN   FICTION      35 

sentiment,  to  do  justice  to  an  imperious,  untram- 
meled  passion  in  the  full  exercise  of  its  tragic 
power.  They  have  now  run  the  gamut,  it  would 
seem ;  love  as  a  social  force  has  been  sounded  in  its 
complete  diapason.  Tolstoy^s  "Anna  Karenina/' 
beginning  the  narrative  where  the  old-fashioned 
tale  would  have  closed,  and  conducting  an  un- 
happy marriage  situation  through  an  experience 
of  guilty  love  to  a  tragic  conclusion,  is  t3rpical 
of  the  class. 

Hence  has  followed  a  shift  in  the  use  of  this 
motive  in  fiction,  which  I  would  emphasize.  It 
would  appear  that  novelists,  by  an  unconscious  re- 
action, perhaps,  or  it  may  be  with  the  feeling  that 
even  a  theme  so  central  and  dominant  as  this,  can 
be  overworked,  have,  for  the  time  at  least,  rele- 
gated love  to  a  place  nearer  the  circumference  of 
the  circle  and  for  the  nonce  are  finding  their  stim- 
ulus elsewhere.  A  plain  sign  of  this  is  the  re- 
crudescence of  the  story  of  adventure.  Fighting 
instead  of  loving,  furnishes  the  attraction,  and  plot 
takes  the  place  of  esoteric  emotion.  During  the 
past  dozen  years  the  tale  of  objective  incident  and 
action  in  English  fiction  has  all  but  pre-empted 
the  field;  a  significant  change  of  theme,  indeed. 
To  be  sure,  love  is  often  admitted  into  these  nar- 
ratives, but  the  point  is  that  as  a  motive  it  is  sub- 
sidiary to  the  major  appeal.  A  striking  example 
is  given  us  in  the  work  of  the  two  writers  of  En- 
glish fiction  confessedly  leaders  in  contemporary 
literature.     I  refer  to    Stevenson    and    Kipling. 


36  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

Neither  of  them  has  awarded  to  love  the  old-time, 
traditional  post  of  honor. 

It  has  been  said  commonly  of  Stevenson  that 
he  could  not  manage  love  as  a  theme.  He  himself 
in  the  ever  delightful  Letters  confesses  with  dan- 
gerous frankness  his  lack  'of  confidence  in  han- 
dling this  motive.  He  felt  that  his  power  lay  else- 
where. !N'evertheless,he  was  in  his  latest  work  com- 
ing to  admit  this  more  Ijrric  interest,  along  with 
the  heroic;  ^^idnapped"  and  its  sequel,  ^TDavid 
Balfour/' are  an  instructive  contrast  in  this  regard. 
While  the  former  is  a  straightaway  adventure  tale, 
with  scant  attention  to  petticoats,  the  other,  writ- 
ten some  years  later,  contains  a  charming  heroine 
and  some  of  the  prettiest  lovemaking  in  modem 
fiction.  Nor  will  the  true  Stevenson  lover  ever 
forget  ^Trince  Otto,"  an  earlier  work  that  deals 
with  the  love  motive  in  a  charming  vein  of  delicate, 
quaint  poetry.  In  Stevenson's  final  books,  too,  "St. 
Ives"  and  '^eir  of  Hermiston,"  this  interest  is 
more  prominent.  "St.  Ives,"  indeed,  is  a  story  in 
which  adventure  and  sweethearting  run  hand  in 
hand ;  and  that  fascinating  torso  '^eir,"  so  far  as 
it  goes,  might  fairly  be  called  a  love-tale,  though 
Mr.  Colvin's  postscript  shows  us  that  the  objective 
incident  of  peril  and  derring-do  was  to  have  culmi- 
nating force.  Stevenson,  in  a  word,  might  be  char- 
acterized as  a  writer  who  as  he  matured  was  led 
more  and  more  to  a  consideration  of  the  eternal 
feminine.  Yet  his  genius  did  not  find  its  most 
authentic  inspiration  there;  and  looking  to  the 


LOVE   MOTIVE   IN   MODERN   FICTION      37 

full  range  of  his  imaginative  creation,  it  may  be 
declared  that  he  used  the  love  motive  but  charily; 
his  main  business  was  with  the  other  passions  of 
men. 

With  Kipling  the  thesis  receives  still  more  ob- 
vious illustration.  In  the  comparatively  slight, 
tentative  sketches  known  as  the  Gadsby  series,  he 
attempted  the  treatment  of  amatory  affairs  after 
the  manner  of  the  cynic.  But  that  sort  of  thing 
ill  suited  his  vigorous  grasp  of  life  and  healthy 
sanity,  and  was  soon  sloughed  off.  The  bulk  of  the 
Indian  Tales — and  the  best  of  them — ,  the  later 
volumes  of  short  stories  whose  themes  are  not  of 
the  East;  the  wonderful  "Jungle  Books;"  the  col- 
laborated "Naulahka;"  and  the  capital  sea-yarn 
'^Captains  Courageous,"  all  of  these  find  their  in- 
tensity of  interest  outside  love.  The  later  collec- 
tions of  short  tales,  "Many  Inventions"  and  "The 
Day's  Work,"  do  not  violate  my  statement.  "The 
Brushwood  Boy"  in  the  second  named  volume,  a 
story  in  which  the  love  passion  is  certainly  cen- 
tral, stands  out  in  contrast  with  the  rest  of  the 
narratives.  An  exception  may  be  made  of  "The 
Light  That  Failed,"  where  obviously  the  relations 
of  Dick  and  Maisie  claim  our  chief  attention,  al- 
though if  we  examine  the  book  for  its  purpose,  it 
will  appear  that  the  study  of  the  artist  tempera- 
ment is  the  author's  main  aim.  Still,  this  fiction 
may  fairly  enough  be  called  a  love  story.  But 
for  a  writer  of  a  dozen  volumes,  Kipling  has  in- 
dicated distinctly  his  preference  for  other  motives. 


38  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

No  one  in  thinking  of  either  him  or  Stevenson 
would  dream  of  citing  them  as  exponents  of  the 
so-called  master-passion. 

The  same  tendency  is  to  be  seen  in  the  work  of 
the  one  contemporary  woman  writer  whose  fiction 
has  the  scope,  poise,  dignity  and  art  likely  to  give 
her  more  than  ephemeral  distinction.  Mrs. 
Humphrey  Ward  has  not  ignored  the  love  motive, 
but  rather  has  made  it  subordinate  to  other  inter- 
ests,— religion,  politics,  sociology.  Her  early  book, 
"Miss  Bretherton,"  might  be  described  as  a  love 
tale,  pure  and  simple.  But  with  and  since  "Eobert 
Elsmere"her  vision  has  been  wider.  The  affectional 
relations  of  the  sexes  are  dealt  with  in  that  novel 
also,  of  course;  as  likewise,  in  some  phases  of  its 
multiform  power,  in  "David  Grieve,"  in  "Mar- 
cella,"  in  "Sir  George  Tressady,"  "The  Story  of 
Bessie  Costrell,"  "Helbeck  of  Bannisdale,"  and  es- 
pecially in  "Eleanor."  But,  with  the  exception  of 
"Eleanor,"  none  of  them  are  love  stories  in  the  con- 
ventional sense.  Even  in  "Eleanor,"  which  would 
properly  enough,  I  suppose,  be  termed  a  love  tale, 
the  interest  is  in  the  sharply  contrasted  women 
characters  far  more  than  in  the  outcome  of  Ban- 
nisty's  somewhat  febrile  passion.  What  the  reader 
is  likely  to  recall  first  in  these  books  of  Mrs.  Ward 
is  the  modern  clergyman  confronted  with  doubt; 
the  aspiring  young  woman  learning  by  dint  of  hard 
experience  the  true  difficulties  between  the  classes 
and  masses;  the  humble  born  man  fighting  his 
way  to  the  spiritual  peace  that  comes  out  of  emo- 


LOVE   MOTIVE   IN   MODERN   FICTION      39 

tional  storm  and  stress;  the  great  lady  influential 
in  affairs,  a  power  behind  the  throne ;  the  peasant 
girl  crushed  by  her  pitiless  environment ;  the  well- 
born mine  owner  anxious  to  adjust  the  questions  of 
labor  versus  capital  and  solving  the  problem  with 
his  knife;  the  agnostic  girl  and  Eomanist  aris- 
tocrat trying  to  make  love  overleap  the  barriers  of 
environment  and  temperament.  All  through  these 
well  wrought  and  noble  volumes  woman  walks  as 
meet  mate  to  man,  shoulder  to  shoulder  with  him 
in  the  struggle.  Indeed,  Mrs.  Ward  and  Mere- 
dith are  conspicuous  among  present  day  novelists 
of  repute  and  power  in  delineating  the  New  Wom- 
an in  the  high  sense  of  the  contemned  word; 
which  is  to  say,  the  Eternal  Woman  under  the 
broader,  more  exacting  conditions  of  our  complex 
social  life.  George  Meredith's  Diana  is  a  creation 
only  possible  to  this  new  conception  of  woman. 
Indeed,  it  is  instructive  to  compare  Meredith's 
Lucy  in  "The  Ordeal  of  Eichard  Feveril,"  a  book 
published  over  forty  years  ago,  with  so  late  a 
woman  characterization  as  his  Diana;  it  suggests 
that  the  novelist  himself  changes  with  the  time. 
In  the  same  way,  food  for  reflection  can  be  found 
in  a  comparison  of  George  Eliot  and  Mrs.  Ward  in 
their  respective  treatments  of  women.  A  veritable 
evolution  of  view  can  be  traced. 

The  rejuvenescence  of  romance  which  has  been  so 
noticeable  in  England  and  America  within  the  past 
half  dozen  years,  and  the  revival  of  the  historical 
novel  both  there  and  in  the  United  States,  also 


40  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

stand  for  a  mood  which,  while  it  does  not  neces- 
sarily exclude  the  treatment  of  love^  at  least  looks 
more  naturally  to  objective  incident  and  bellicose 
action  for  its  subject-material.  It  may  then  fairly 
be  postulated  from  present  indications  that  the 
love  theme,  traditionally  so  central,  and  illuminat- 
ing the  course  of  English  fiction  from  Fielding  to 
Meredith  will  be  in  the  future — not  eliminated — 
but  handled  in  conjunction  with  and  subordinate 
to  the  modem  interests  which  have  so  vastly  ex- 
tended the  content  of  the  novel  in  our  time.  Or 
is  it  saner  prophecy  to  declare  that,  by  a  natural 
law  of  reaction,  the  novelists  of  the  next  century 
will  come  back  to  an  older  assumption,  reinstating 
the  love  that  is  after  all  the  light  of  life,  in  its 
old  time  queenship?  One  consideration  makes 
this  dubious.  The  shifted  place  of  the  love  motive 
is  due  to  the  shifted  place  of  woman  in  the  social 
complex.  She  is  no  longer  reared  to  regard  mar- 
riage as  a  sole  vocation.  The  daughters  of  well- 
to-do  and  cultured  folk  are  not  infrequently  edu- 
cated nowadays  with  an  eye  to  self-supporting 
work.  Even  if  parental  encouragement  lacks, 
modern  girls  in  increasing  numbers  are  ambitious 
to  achieve  in  some  field  of  endeavor.  The  spinster 
of  to-day  no  longer  sits  with  folded  hands  by  the 
lonesome  hearth  sadly  reminiscent,  knitting  her 
employ,  regret  her  mood.  She  turns  artist,  house- 
decorator,  architect,  teacher,  actor,  musician, 
nurse,  writer,  physician  or  lawyer.  She  looks  to 
the  future,  not  to  the  past.    With  this  infinitely 


LOVE   MOTIVE   IN   MODERN   FICTION      41 

more  complex  activity  and  its  correspondent 
breadth  of  outlook,  it  is  easy  to  understand  that 
the  conventional  value  of  love  to  her  life — "'Tis 
woman's  whole  existence/'  quoth  Byron — should 
give  way;  and  equally  easy  to  understand  that 
story  makers,  perceiving  the  social  drift,  should 
register  it  in  their  feignings  of  human  intercourse. 
The  term  ^^old  maid"  is  fast  passing,  at  least  in 
any  opprobrious  sense.  Balzac  did  a  daring  thing 
in  making  the  woman  of  thirty  interesting  and 
eligible  for  a  prominent  position  in  his  fiction. 
It  is  now  the  commonplace  of  novel-writing 
to  show  her  power,  her  charm,  her  right  to  a  use- 
ful life  independent  of  the  poor  creature,  man. 
Dickens's  women,  as  a  rule,  seem  old-fashioned  to 
us  as  we  read  him  to-day;  his  presentation  of 
them  in  this  respect  is  one  of  the  chief  explana- 
tions of  the  fact. 

It  must  be  remembered,  too,  in  the  discussion 
that  the  representation  of  love  varies  with  nation- 
ality. The  tendency  in  English  fiction  to  remove 
this  motive  from  its  supreme  position  is  by  no 
means  typical  of  the  European  literatures.  The 
Latin  races,  as  a  whole,  for  example,  incline  still 
to  make  fictional  interest  dependent  upon  love, 
and  usually  upon  love  sensual.  Mrs.  Crawford, 
writing  in  the  lamented  Cosmopolis  of  the  brilliant 
young  Italian,  D'Annunzio,  remarks  that  in  his 
country  the  love  motive  predominates  to  an  extent 
that  sober  Northern  natures  cannot  realize.  Of 
Spain,  this  is  also  true,  though  to  a  less  degree. 


V'*" 

V 


42  FORCES   m  FICTION 

In  France,  however,  a  land  always  sensitively  in 
the  van  of  intellectual  and  social  progress,  the 
prevalence  of  the  novel  of  passion  is  by  no  means 
what  it  was  a  few  years  ago.  Zola's  latest  novels 
subordinate  the  love  motive;  witness  the  trilogy 
of  the  cities. 

It  is,  then,  in  fiction  of  our  own  tongue  that  the 
V/'  revolt  from  the  tyranny  of  love  as  an  all-absorb- 
ing theme  can  be  traced  most  convincingly.  And 
it  seems  to  me  that  this  is  a  testimonial  to  the 
inspiring  breadth  and  variety  of  our  novel.  Sneers 
have  been  plenty  in  respect  to  the  narrow  prudery 
of  the  life-view  expressed  in  English  novels;  but 
unwillingness  to  treat  of  the  bestial  aspects  of 
love  is  no  whit  narrower  than  unwillingness  to 
admit  the  other  main  interests  and  passions  of 
mankind.  In  this  admission  our  fiction  leads,  and, 
so  far  as  it  goes,  such  leadership  is  a  proof,  not  of 
narrowness,  but  of  breadth, — of  a  truer  insight 
and  a  finer  sense  of  proportion  in  looking  out 
upon  the  great  human  show. 

Still,  let  us  admit  that  the  somewhat  remark- 
able change  I  have  glanced  at  is  really  not  so 
much  the  disappearance  of  Love,  as  an  altered 
(and  broader)  conception  of  it,  together  with  the 
admission  of  other  interests  as  the  life  picture 
^j5^  I  has  grown  larger.  Disappear  love  never  will  from 
fiction  until  it  does  from  Life, — which  will  happen 
only  when  our  sun  has  become  a  moon.  Sex 
love  in  the  latest  and  noblest  conception  is  one 
phase,  and  a  precious  phase,  of  the  all -love, — a 


I    UNlVfeKttM  T     ■ 


LOVE   MOTIVE   IN   MODERN   FICTION      43 

power  and  a  principle  of  many  manifestations; 
friend-love,  child-love,  parent-love,  patriotism,  na- 
ture-love, love  for  truth,  for  religion, — an  idea 
finely  brought  out  in  an  essay  by  _  Sidney  Lanier 
posthumously  published.  It  is  natural  that  with 
this  broader  apperception  of  the  word,  novelists 
should  elect  not  only  these  more  varied  phases  of 
Love,  but  also  use  war,  politics,  socialism,  social 
ambitions,  trade,  sports,  art,  literature,  religion, 
as  motives  to  make  their  pages  animated  and 
cheerful  and  more  truly  representative  of  Life 
itself. 


THE  DARK  IN  LITERATURE 

Those  who  are  sensitive  to  literature  at  all  turn 
to  it  for  various  reasons, — for  rest,  pleasure,  com- 
fort, instruction,  uplift.  To  forget  its  power  to 
make  this  manifold  appeal  were  sadly  to  restrict 
its  influence.  Literature  follows  the  gospel  in- 
junction ;  it  is  many  things  to  many  men.  This, 
indeed,  is  only  a  roundabout  way  of  saying  that 
it  is  a  great  force  in  the  world ;  for  how  otherwise 
could  it  get  a  wide  hearing? 

Nevertheless,  I  am  persuaded  that  the  larger 
number  of  readers  still  look,  as  they  have  always 
looked,  to  poem  and  essay,  play  and  story  —  to 
belles  lettres,  in  short  —  for  what  may  be  called 
pleasure.  Of  old,  this  was  overwhelmingly  true; 
it  is  somewhat  less  apparent  now,  when  both  au- 
thor and  reader  have  come  to  take  their  literature 
seriously,  and  duty  at  times  crowds  delight  to  the 
wall.  However,  the  wayfaring  man  continues  to 
insist,  in  good  set  terms,  on  an  agreeable  time 
when  he  opens  a  book;  and  if  you  are  fain  to  in- 
struct him  you  must  do  it  cautiously  without  over- 
much announcement  of  your  laudable  purpose. 
Unless  the  pill  be  sugar-coated  he  will  have  none 
of  it;  homceopathy  is  the  school  he  favors. 

Critics  who  overlook  this  natural  human  tenden- 
cy are  letting  themselves  get  professional  and  out 
of  touch  with  their  fellow  mortals.    I  believe  that, 

44 


THE   DARK  IN  LITERATURE 


45 


while  our  conception  of  the  use  of  literature  may 
well  be  a  broader  one,  this  pathetic  desire  of  aver- 
age humanity  to  be  pleased  is  a  wholesome  notifi- 
cation to  critic  and  creator,  to  special  student  and 
him  of  the  inner  circle,  that  the  main  business  of 
letters  is  to  furnish  joy  to  the  children  of  men. 
Especially  is  this  thought  pertinent  to-day,  when 
the  other  obligations  of  literature  are  underscored. 

It  is  as  well  to  remember  that  unhappiness  is 
ot  an  end  in  itself.  The  assumption,  by  the  way, 
that  a  book  must  either  please  or  instruct,  as  if 
the  two  demands  were  mutually  exclusive,  is  ab- 
surd— an  example  of  false  logic.  Eather  may  it 
be  said,  as  Stevenson  has  it,  that  "to  please  is  to 
jBerve ;  and  so  far  from  its  being  difficult  to  instruct 
hile  you  amuse,  it  is  difficult  to  do  the  one  thor- 
oughly without  the  other." 

But  no  honest  person  can  go  far  in  the  fruitful 
study  of  the  masterpieces  of  thought  and  expres- 
sion without  coming  face  to  face  with  the  need 
of  extending  this  pleasure-giving  concept  of  litera- 
ture, or,  at  any  rate,  of  using  the  word  pleasure 
in  a  fuller  significance.  He  finds  that  it  is  very 
much  with  literature  as  it  is  with  the  weather. 
All  sorts  are  encountered,  the  stormy  with  the 
bland ;  and  even  in  the  presumably  serene  climate 
of  the  so-called  immortals,  halcyon  days  by  no 
means  run  the  year  round.  He  is  confronted, 
sooner  or  later,  with  the  questions:  How  broad 
may  I  make  my  definition  of  this  elusive  term 
pleasure?    What  is  the  proper  proportion  of  light 


46  FORGES   IN  FICTION 

and  shade  in  these  pictures  of  life  painted  with 
words  instead  of  colors  ?  Has  the  dark — meaning 
thereby  the  somber  and  sad,  the  terrible,  brutal, 
and  abnormal  elements  of  life  reflected  in  books — 
any  justification?  And  where  are  the  bounds  to 
be  set?  Upon  the  answers  depend  his  whole  atti- 
tude toward  literature  and  the  amount  of  substan- 
tive enrichment  received  from  it.  I  know  of  no 
more  important  moment  in  personal  literary  cul- 
ture than  the  one  of  this  decision;  and  it  was 
with  a  sense  of  this  importance  that  my  theme 
was  chosen. 

Few  even  of  those  who  are  unfriendly  to  the 
dark  in  literature,  will  deny  that  the  sad  has  some 
right  there,  or  that  pleasure  may  co-exist  with 
sadness.  To  shut  out  the  imaginative  presentation 
of  the  tragic  would  result  in  a  woful  weakening 
and  crippling  of  literature — would,  indeed,  decap- 
itate masterpiece  after  masterpiece.  From  the 
time  that  Aristotle  pointed  out  the^  noble  function 
of  tragedy  in  purging  our  souls  through  terror 
and  pity,  the  major  creators  in  literature  have 
steadily  illustrated  his  position.  And,  in  truth, 
long  before  the  great  Greek  critic,  the  Hebrew 
rhapsodists  shook  their  time,  and  after-time,  with 
the  very  thunders  of  Sinai.  It  might  also  be  said 
that  the  precious  places,  the  mighty  effects,  in 
world-literature,  are  just  those  where  the  grave 
things  of  life  are  set  before  us  surcharged  with 
passion,  but  touched  with  beauty,  set  to  consoling 
music,  and  illumined  by  imperishable  hopes.    Job, 


THE   DARK   IN   LITERATURE  47 

superbly  alone  and  afflicted  on  his  ash-heap ;  An- 
tigone, going  smiling  to  her  tomb;  Chaucer's 
Griselda,  patient  and  amazed  at  her  ill  treatment, 
and  exclaiming,  as  the  thought  of  her  husband's 
earlier  love  for  her  overwhelmed  her  mind: 

"O  gode  God!  how  gentil  and  how  kinde 
Te  semed  by  your  speche  and  your  visage 
The  day  that  maked  was  our  mariage"; 

Lear  appealing  to  the  stormy  heavens,  since  they 
were  old  like  him;  Dante  listening  to  Francesca's 
piteous  tale  of  love,  strong  though  in  hell;  Gret- 
chen  in  the  Garden,  conscious  of  her  guilt,  yet 
crying  with  that  infinitely  pathetic  child-cry: 

"Yet,  everything  that  led  me  here 
Was  oh,  so  good,  was  oh,  so  dear"; 

Beatrice  Cenci,  talking  of  her  hair  just  before 
she  goes  out  to  the  block ;  Mildred,  in  Browning's 
"A  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon,"  with  those  wonderful 
girlish  words  of  hers: 

"I— I  was  so  young! 
Beside,   I  loved  him,  Thorold— and  I  had 
No  mother;  God  forgot  me:  so  I  f eU  "— 

these,  I  say,  are  the  scenes  that  to  the  lover  of 
literature  rise  up  in  memory  like  southern  stars 
in  the  night  heavens,  stars  whose  sombre  setting  is 
the  very  condition  of  the  splendor  of  their  shining. 
Give  us  this  kind  of  sadness,  by  all  means,  for  by 
it  our  souls  grow  and  we  are  made  to  feel  the 
sacred  majesty  of  humankind.  It  is  not  so  much 
sadness,  strictly  speaking,  that  we  experience  in 


48  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

looking  at  these  moving  life  dramas,  as  a  sort  of 
sober  joy.  Our  sense  of  homo  sapiens  is  enlarged 
as  to  his  essential  dignity  and  worth.  This  is  sad- 
ness, not  for  its  own  sake,  but  for  humanity's. 

Nor  should  we  forget  that,  besides  this  proper 
acceptance  of  what  I  may  term  the  legitimate  and 
wholesome  sad  in  literature,  many  folk  have  a 
morbid  love  of  sadness  for  its  own  sake.  There 
is  no  hypochondriac  like  your  young  person  in 
the  storm  and  stress  period  of  his  career.  Fears 
are  his  food  and  tears  his  daily  portion.  In 
youth  we  like  to  take  our  pleasures  sadly;  while 
in  the  years  that  bring  the  philosophic  mind  we 
try  to  take  our  pains  with  a  smiling  mouth.  A 
type  of  spinster  exists  which  affects  funerals  as 
the  chief  of  worldly  joys.  This  pleasure  in  the 
lugubrious  is  certainly  a  trait  to  be  found  at  least 
sporadically  in  the  world.  Perhaps  it  existed  in 
the  past  more  frequently  than  it  does  now — I  hope 
so.  Judge  Sewall  has  this  entry  in  his  diary: 
^^Spent  the  morning  in  the  vault  rearranging  the 
family  coffins.  It  was  a  pleasant  but  awful  treat." 
This  zest  for  the  melancholy  is  quite  another 
thing,  of  course,  from  the  response  to  that  beauti- 
ful, close  harmony,  which,  though  it  sound  like  a 
discord,  is  yet  so  suggestive  of  the  perfect  har- 
mony (the  ideal)  as  to  make  us  tremble  with  de- 
light. I  only  wish  to  make  the  point  that  there 
is  in  human  nature  some  response  to  a  less  admir- 
able phase  of  the  dark  in  life  and  literature,  a 
kind  of  ghoulish  joy  in  the  grave.     The  mock- 


THE   DARK   IN   LITERATURE  49 

romantic  cult  in  fiction,  in  the  time  of  Horace 
Walpole  and  Mrs.  Eadcliffe,  gives  another  ex- 
ample. Eecall  that  delicious  bit  of  dialogue  in 
Jane  Austen's  "Northanger  Abbey/'  where  she 
satirizes  the  tendency: 

"  'But,  my  dearest  Catherine,  what  have  you  been,  doing 
with  yourself  all  this  morning?  Have  you  gone  on  with 
Udolpho?' 

"  'Yes,  I  have  been  reading  it  ever  since  I  woke;  and 
I  am  got  to  the  black  veil.' 

"  'Are  you,  indeed?  How  delightful!  Oh!  I  would  not 
tell  you  what  is  behind  the  black  veil  for  the  world!  Are 
you  not  wild  to  know?' 

"  'Oh!  yes,  quite;  what  can  it  be?  But  do  not  tell  me: 
I  would  not  be  told  upon  any  account.  I  know  it  must  be 
a  skeleton;  I  am  sure  it  is  Laurentina's  skeleton.  Oh! 
I  am  delighted  with  the  book!  I  should  like  to  spend  my 
whole  life  in  reading  it,  I  assure  you;  if  it  had  not  been 
to  meet  you,  I  would  not  have  come  away  from  it  for  all 
the  world.' 

"  'Dear  creature!  how  much  I  am  obliged  to  you;  and 
when  you  have  finished  Udolpho,  we  will  read  the  Italian 
together;  and  I  have  made  out  a  list  of  ten  or  twelve 
more  of  the  same  kind  for  you.' 

"  'Have  you,  indeed!  How  glad  I  am!  What  are  they 
all?' 

"  'I  will  read  you  their  names  directly;  here  they  are 
in  my  pocketbook;  "Castle  of  Wolfenbach,"  "Clermont," 
"Mysterious  Warnings,"  "Necromancer  of  the  Black 
Forest,"  "Midnight  Bell,"  "Orphan  of  the  Rhine,"  and 
"Horrid  Mysteries."    Those  will  last  us  some  time.' 

"'Yes;  pretty  well;  but  are  they  all  horrid?  Are  you 
sure  they  are  all  horrid?' 

"  'Yes,  quite  sure;  for  a  particular  friend  of  mine,  a 
Miss  Andrews,  a  sweet  girl,  one  of  the  sweetest  creatures 
in  the  world,  has  read  every  one  of  them.'  " 

Some  rather  cynical  theories  of  human  nature 
go  even  further  than  this.  A  distinguished  French 
dramatic  critic  of  our  day,  in  a  recent  work  on 
the  ancient  and  modern  drama,  takes  the  position 


50  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

that  our  interest  in  tragedy  is  at  bottom  simply 
the  survival  of  the  old  savage  instinct  of  cruelty, 
the  enjoyment  of  suffering.  He  builds  up  a  whole 
superstructure  of  theory  upon  this  foundation.  I 
believe  myself  that  he  does  great  wrong  to  human 
psychology  in  this  ingenious  assumption,  which, 
however,  is  interesting  as  offering  one  explana- 
tion of  certain  familiar  tendencies  in  modern  lit- 
erature. But  one  hardly  needs  to  say  that  all  this 
morbid  affecting  of  the  sad  is  clearly  to  be  dis- 
tinguished from  its  proper  use  in  books. 

But  not  the  pathetic  alone,  the  awful,  too,  is 
common  in  literature — an  element  that  not  so 
much  moves  us  to  tenderness  as  it  freezes  us 
with  fear  or  humbles  us  with  a  feeling  of  our 
own  littleness  in  the  face  of  the  sublime.  This 
influence  again,  when  not  out  of  proportion, 
can  be  easily  accepted;  in  fact,  the  term  pleasure 
may  be  possibly  so  enlarged  in  its  meaning  as  to 
include  this  idea.  Irving,  in  his  '^Conquest  of 
Granada,"  speaks  of  the  ^^pleasing  terror"  begotten 
in  him  by  the  sight  of  a  shaggy  Adalusian  bull 
encountered  among  the  mountains  of  his  native 
wilds.  The  expression  puts  before  us,  epigram- 
matically,  a  psychological  truth.  There  is  a  stern, 
lofty  grandeur  in  the  works  of  creative  genius 
which  constitutes  their  head-mark  of  merit.  Lit- 
erature would  be  poor,  indeed,  without  its  Michael 
Angelos  and  its  Beethovens,  its  Wagners  and  its 
Vereschagins.  Their  works  may  not  soften,  but 
they  strengthen  our  sinews  for  the  fight.    And  as 


I 


THE   DARK   IN   LITERATURE  51 


"we  go  on  in  life  we  gradually  come  to  care  more 
for  and  to  get  more  from,  these  austere,  great  per- 
formances. A  young  man  or  woman  at  twenty- 
one  might  be  inclined  to  refuse  to  the  terrible  a 
place  in  literature ;  the  same  person  at  forty  might 
be  deriving  from  that  source  the  most  precious 
part  of  his  or  her  experience. 

Man's  attitude  toward  the  awe-inspiring  has 
rapidly  changed  during  the  last  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years.  English  literature  registers  this  fact. 
Up  to  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century  Alpine 
scenery  was  viewed  in  its  horrific,  repellent  as- 
pects ;  and  when,  a  few  years  later,  the  poet  Gray 
described  it  as  fit  stimulus  for  aesthetic  apprecia- 
tion, he  struck  a  new  and,  as  it  then  seemed,  a 
bizarre  note.  Yet,  less  than  a  hundred  years 
thereafter,  we  find  Ruskin  at  his  finest  of  music 
and  majesty  in  hymning  the  glories  of  those  Swiss 
mountains.  Awe  has  widened  the  hitherto  arbi- 
trarily narrow  notion  of  beauty,  and  the  Plutonian 
forces  of  Nature  are  made  to  minister  to  spiritual 
ends.  Fear — like  unto  that  fear  of  the  Lord  which 
is  the  beginning  of  wisdom — is  as  beneficent  as  joy 
herself. 

But  literature,  and  modern  literature  in  special, 
makes  room  for  other  aspects  of  life  besides  the 
appealingly  pathetic  and  the  awe-inspiring.  The 
ugly,  and  the  brutal,  and  the  foul  are  there  in 
crowded  cohorts  and  sickening  display.  The  night 
side  of  Nature  and  the  devil  side  of  human  nature, 
these  are  portrayed  at  full  length.    In  the  litera- 


52  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

ture  of  the  past  twenty-five  years  fiction  has  a  bad 
preeminence  in  this  respect,  though  it  may  be  said 
that  the  drama  has  not  been  very  far  behind.  One's 
attitude  toward  the  unlovely  is  naturally  of  much 
consequence  to  oneself  and  one's  fellow  men.  Has 
the  handling  of  the  degenerate  and  abnormal — 
manifestations  of  which  are  indubitably  to  be 
found  in  this  third  planet  from  the  sun — any 
justification?  Is  Zola's  "Nana"  or  Daudet's 
"Sappho"  a  type  instructive  enough  to  make  her 
acquaintance  worth  while  ?  Is  Hardy's  "Jude  the 
Obscure/'  not  to  say  the  obscene,  a  man  who  can 
teach  us  by  his  wretched  failures  some  life-lesson 
of  value  ?  At  a  time  when  some  of  the  very  great- 
est writers  alive  find  a  natural  expression  of  their 
power  in  such  scenes  and  characters  as  are  sug- 
gested by  these  names,  it  is  imperative  for  the 
world  of  thoughtful,  educated  readers  to  take  a 
stand  and  have  an  intelligent  opinion  upon  this 
burning  question,  condemning  with  a  sweet  rea- 
sonableness or  approving  with  a  like  show  of  sense. 
We  cannot  dodge  the  duty,  for  the  last  decade  has 
intensified  the  danger  and  made  the  problem  more 
intricate. 

Now,  let  me  say  with  candor  that  I  think  even 
here  we  must  not  be  too  sweeping,  and  cry,  "Let 
the  ugly  be  anathema ;  it  is  an  evil  blot  on  the  fair 
fame  of  literature."  This  sort  of  remark  is  al- 
ways popular  with  the  gallery,  but  it  is  a  careless 
generalization.  Beyond  peradventure  the  ugly — 
I  mean  the  morally  as  well  as  materially  ugly — ■ 


THE   DARK   IN   LITERATURE  53 

has  a  use  in  literature.  There  are  two  ways  of 
presenting  ethical  ideals,  of  making  a  spiritual 
impression:  one  by  showing  types  of  virtue,  the 
other  by  showing  types  of  vice.  In  the  former, 
we  are  made  to  love  the  good  by  direct  example; 
in  the  latter,  to  hate  the  bad,  and  hence  to  desire 
the  good.  The  methods  are  respectively  positive 
and  negative;  the  aim  is  the  same,  or  may  be. 

I  recall  no  great  English  writer  who  better  illus- 
trates the  union  of  these  two  methods  than  Eobert 
Browning.  Nobody  in  his  senses  disputes  the 
splendid  ethical  sanity  of  this  robust  seer-singer. 
Yet  in  poem  after  poem  he  paints  the  ravages  of 
sin  in  the  persons  of  men  and  women  who  possess 
a  kind  of  shuddering  fascination  for  the  sensitive 
admirer  of  Browning — ^^Subtlest  assertor  of  the 
soul  in  song."  Think  of  the  "Soliloquy  of  the 
Spanish  Cloister,'^  with  its  hideous  old  monk,  his 
heart  full  of  envy  and  hate ;  of  such  other  churchly 
figures  as  the  Bishop  who  orders  his  tomb;  of 
Porphyria's  lover,  strangling  his  sweetheart  with 
her  golden  hair ;  of  that  other  woman  with  golden 
hair,  the  maiden  of  Pornic,  with  her  horrible  greed 
for  money  even  in  the  grave;  of  many  another 
light  creature  with  the  skin-deep  beauty  that  lures 
men  on  to  hell;  of  the  frank  fleshliness  of  the 
loves  of  Ottima  and  Sebald  in  "Pippa  Passes"; 
of  the  loathsome  landscape  Childe  Roland  was 
forced  to  look  upon ;  of  the  searching  cynicism  of 
a  brief  lyric  like  "Adam,  Lilith  and  Eve" ;  and  of 
the  frank  approval  of  active  sin,  rather  than  the 


54  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

half-hearted  willing  of  sin,  in  "The  Statue  and 
the  Bust." 

Think  of  these  and  plenty  of  other  Browning 
poems,  and  realize  that  this  man  insisted  on  the 
dramatic  representation  of  all  that  is  human, 
whether  of  good  or  ill.  And  yet,  who  does  more 
to  brace  us  for  the  spiritual  battle-field?  No, 
the  test  must  go  deeper  than  the  matter  of  mate- 
rial or  theme;  it  is  the  character  of  the  literary 
creator — ^his  aim  and  ideal — that  settles  the  thing. 
Given  the  right  kind  of  worker  behind  the  work, 
and  no  subject,  however  repulsive,  is  inadmissible 
to  art — at  least  in  the  moral  view.  Esthetic 
considerations  there  may  be  which  put  up  the  bars 
against  this  or  that;  but  the  moral  result  lies  in 
the  intention. 

When,  as  not  seldom  happens,  a  namby-pamby 
conventionality  sets  up  to  be  sole  arbiter  of  such 
questions,  it  must  be  promptly  rebuked.  I  have 
had  this  truth  impressed  upon  me  in  reading  of 
late  the  newest  product  of  two  living  writers  of 
international  standing, — Tolsto/s  novel  'Resur- 
rection," and  Ibsen's  play,  ''W^hen  We  Dead 
Awaken."  In  the  Eussian  story  the  protagonists 
are  a  harlot  on  trial  for  murder  and  her  aristo- 
cratic betrayer.  One  is  asked  to  spend  a  large 
part  of  the  time  in  the  government  prisons  amidst 
the  offscouring  of  the  earth.  The  realism  is  in- 
sistent, suppressing  nothing,  telling  everything. 
In  this  respect  the  book  is  most  inartistic;  it 
neglects  selection,  a  cardinal  virtue  in  all  art. 


I 


THE   DARK   IN   LITERATURE  65 

I  may  add,  in  passing,  that  Tolstoy's  technique 
has  always  lacked  in  this  respect:  his  fellow-coun- 
tryman, Turgneneff,  was  his  superior  here.  But 
"Eesurrection,"  in  spite  of  all  this,  seizes  upon 
me — what  can  we  do  but  make  confession  of  our 
personal  experiences  in  such  a  case? — as  one  of 
the  noblest  and  most  beautiful  works  ever  put 
forth ;  hardly  a  masterpiece,  because  of  its  defects, 
but  a  deeply  moving  presentment  of  man's  tragi- 
comedy of  the  years;  a  wonderful  study  of  a  soul 
that  returns  to  the  good,  that  "comes  to  itself," 
in  the  matchless  words  of  the  Bible ;  and  a  potent 
and  eloquent  plea  for  fair  dealing  between  men 
and  women  and  for  loving  kindness  even  to  crim- 
inals. Tolstoy  is  a  man  with  the  daring  naivete 
to  try  to  imitate  Christ  in  his  daily  life ;  and  both 
his  life  and  his  work  exhale  an  aroma  of  righteous- 
ness. All  his  malodorous  realism  cannot  taint  those 
airs  that  blow  from  God.  His  purpose  shines 
through  it  like  a  light  through  a  sunless  cavern. 

In  Ibsen's  drama — a  strange,  maddeningly  mys- 
tic deliverance  it  is,  like  most  of  his  work  for  the  ten 
years  past — the  conventions  are  played  with  fast 
and  loose,  as  usual,  and  to  some  the  piece  will  do 
little  but  preach  the  setting  aside  of  marriage 
vows  in  the  case  of  elective  affinities.  Indeed,  one 
might  almost  say  of  this  play  that  it  is  Goethe 
come  again,  with  an  austere  mountain  setting  and 
a  stern  suppression  of  sentimental  gush.  And  yet, 
as  I  sat  rather  dazed  for  some  ten  minutes  after 
closing  the  volume,  and  let  the  message  have. its 


56  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

way  with  me — one  of  those  fractions  of  time  which 
really  count  in  one's  intellectual  life — ^I  felt  that 
there  was  at  least  one  lesson  there  for  one  reader. 
The  sculptor  who  used  his  beautiful  model  as  a 
model  and  never  loved  her  as  a  woman,  though 
she  had  given  him  her  soul,  had  never  truly  lived. 
They  have  both  made  loveless  marriages  since ;  but 
when  they  come  together  again  after  long  years  they 
are  as  the  dead,  and  only  awaken  when  they  realize 
what  has  been  lost.  In  brief,  it  is  an  idealist's 
statement  of  love,  a  mystic  sublimation  thereof. 
The  play  is  scarcely  healthy,  but  it  possesses  a 
tremendous  suggestion  touching  the  world's  mas- 
ter-passion. 

Caution,  then,  is  the  watchword  in  judging  a 
great  man's  handling  of  the  seamy  side  of  life  in 
literature.  This  applies  to  many  a  so-called  pur- 
pose novel  and  problem  play  of  our  time,  in  j^hich 
a  daring  theme  is  boldly  set  forth  and  a  degree 
of  frankness  is  reached  disagreeable  to  those  who 
would  have  their  literary  path  ^^roses,  roses  all 
the  way."  Such  swinging  of  the  axe  may  clear 
the  social  trail  for  a  more  enlightened  civilization. 
Fiction  like  "The  IManxman,"  drama  like  "The 
Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray,"  have  a  place,  I  dare 
avouch,  within  the  broad  demesne  of  art.  There 
is  danger  of  becoming  lax  of  iibre  and  limited  in 
thought-range  when  they  are  forbidden.  In  the 
broadest  sense,  the  pleasure  got  from  literature  is 
in  an  exhibition  of  life — an  inclusive  definition  of 
literature  being  that  it  is  a  representation  of  life 


THE   BARK   IN   LITERATURE  57 

in  terms  of  power  and  beauty.  ^^Memory,"  says 
Balzac  in  a  letter  to  Madame  Hanska,  "only  regis- 
ters thoroughly  that  which  is  pain.  In  this  sense 
it  recalls  great  joy,  for  pleasure  comes  very  near 
to  being  pain" — a  remark  in  which  the  modern 
psychologist  will  heartily  agree  with  the  French 
master.  The  languid,  lackadaisical  appreciation 
of  the  sweetly  pretty  in  art  is,  therefore,  a  pitiable 
impoverishment  of  the  possibilities  of  literature. 
Much  of  the  so-called  realistic  writing  of  to-day — 
not  all  of  it — can  be  welcomed  as  having  a  genu- 
ine mission  for  men,  if  only  we  will  extend  our 
conception  of  its  function. 

The  dark,  we  have  plead,  may  be  a  foil  to  the 
light,  which  seems  to  be  God's  own  use  of  it;  it 
may  spur  us  on  to  better  things  by  a  graphic  pic- 
ture of  things  less  excellent.  Even  if  it  leave  us 
hopelessly  sad — as  in  the  quiet,  sardonic  pessim- 
ism of  a  fatalist  like  Hard}^,  or  in  a  soured  re- 
former like  Ibsen,  wrapping  himself  round  in  the 
protective  robes  of  a  baffling  mysticism — it  may 
still  be  of  service  in  enlarging  the  sense  of  life's 
ultimate  meaning.  It  can  make  us  weep  tears  that 
have  a  sweet  issue  in  altruistic  endeavor,  or  awe 
us  so  that  never  again  we  break  into  the  ^^augh 
mistimed  in  tragic  presences." 

In  the  last  analysis,  perhaps,  the  only  insuffer- 
able use  of  the  dark  is  that  which  fouls,  poisons, 
panders  to  the  base ;  and  often  this  is  not  somber 
at  all,  but  rather  speciously  glittering  and  seduc- 
tive, like  the  gaiety  of  the  "Contes  Drolatique,"  the 


58  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

alluring  voluptuousness  of  "Mademoiselle  de  Mau- 
pin/'  In  current  literature  we  have^,  God  knows, 
enough  of  this  and  to  spare.  But  let  us  not  be 
hasty  to  condemn  that  which  in  its  earnest  under 
purpose  and  grim  largeness  belongs  to  quite  an- 
other category.  As  in  life,  so  in  literature,  aim 
and  ideal  are  everjrfching.  If  they  be  sane  and 
high,  it  follows,  as  the  night  the  day,  that  the 
author  "cannot  then  be  false  to  any  man." 

I  would  thus  defend  a  generous  use  of  the  dark 
in  literature.  We  must  be  athletic  enough  to  en- 
joy it,  and  thoughtful  enough  to  learn  its  lessons, 
no  more  flinching  them  than  we  do  the  lessons  of 
life  itself.  For  literature  is  not  merely  an  escape 
from  life,  though  in  some  of  its  idyllic  moments 
it  may  do  us  minor  service  of  this  kind.  It  is  also 
a  criticism  of  life,  in  Arnold's  phrase,  or  better, 
an  interpretation  of  our  days  and  deeds,  so  that 
symbol  explains  fact,  and  we  see  not  through  a 
glass  darkly,  but,  for  the  nonce,  face  to  face.  And, 
with  a  proper  placing  of  the  shadows  in  the  back- 
ground, how  lovely  is  the  sunlight,  the  bird-song, 
the  breath  of  the  cheerful  open! 

Moral  health  demands  both  sides.  Burroughs 
gives  good  advice  when  he  tells  the  dyspeptic  in- 
clined, to  get  a  taste  of  something  bitter  in  the 
woods.  A  stalwart  idealism — ^which  is  the 
only  sort  wanted  —  must  recognize  the  di- 
vine in  and  through  the  dark;  else  is  our 
light  not  light,  but  darkness  visible.  He  who 
with   Merlin   follows   the   gleam   shall  not  win 


THE    BARK    IN    LITERATURE  59 

to  the  Delectable  Mountain,  save  by  many 
a  Via  Dolorosa,  crowded  thick  with  sorry 
men  and  women,  through  the  Bad  Lands  of  doubt, 
agony,  sin,  and  seeming  death.  It  is  the  price 
paid  for  coming  at  the  heights;  neither  life  nor 
literature  can  yield  their  rich  rewards  by  any 
other  bargain. 


k 


POETRY  AND  THE  DRAMA 

In  these  days,  when  there  is  a  marked  movement 
toward  bringing  poetry  and  the  drama  together 
for  the  purpose  of  reestablishing  a  literature  of 
the  stage,  it  may  not  be  amiss  to  say  a  word  con- 
cerning their  true  relations.  During  the  last 
twenty  years,  under  the  influence  of  Ibsen  and 
his  followers,  plays  have  been  written  and  acted 
in  many  tongues  which  made  a  double  appeal ;  the 
appeal  of  drama,  something  to  be  heard  in  the 
theatre;  and  the  appeal  of  poetry,  a  book  to  be 
read  at  home  like  other  books.  The  divorce  of 
literature  and  the  theatre  had  been  all  but  univer- 
sal ;  France  alone,  since  the  time  of  Moliere,  hav- 
ing been  true  to  older  ideals  of  dramatic  art.  In 
English-speaking  lands  the  separation  has  been  so 
complete  that  many  who  forget  the  bygone  glories 
of  the  Elizabethan  stage  smile  at  the  idea  of  any 
such  rehabilitation  as  is  now  slowly  occurring. 
Scholars  of  the  cut-and-dried  type  are  slow  to 
wake  up  to  the  clear  change  for  the  better.  Thus, 
a  recent  volume  with  the  stimulating  title,  "Later 
English  Drama,''  arousing  the  hope  that  here  is  to 
be  discussion  of  writers  such  as  Pinero,  Jones  and 
Shaw,  stops  short  with  Bulwer  Lytton's  "Riche- 
lieu" and  a  single  line  of  contemptuous  reference 
to  "such  authors  as  T.  W.  Robertson,  Tom  Tay- 

60 


I 


POETRY   AND    THE   DRAMA  61 

lor,  Dion  Boucicault  and  W.  S.  Gilbert" — as  if 
the  rest  was  silence. 

JBut  plays  are  at  present  being  produced  by 
Englishmen,  if  not  by  Americans,  which  are  for 
reading  as  well  as  acting.  The  dramas  of  Jones, 
Pinero  and  Grundy  are  steadily  printed;  writers 
like  Comyns  Carr,  Laurence  Irving,  W.  B.  Yeats, 
Mrs.  Craigie  and  Stephen  Phillips  produce  poetic 
jplays  which  really  get  behind  the  footlights ;  while 
novels  innumerable  are  turned  into  drama-form, 
and  when  their  maker  is  a  man  of  the  standing  of 
Hardy,  Du  Maurier  or  Barrie,  help  to  spread  the 
notion  of  a  literary  drama.  Even  the  present  re- 
markable vogue  of  dramatized  novels,  which  is 
sneered  at  in  some  quarters  as  a  sign  of  the  un- 
ereative  condition  of  the  current  drama,  has  at 
least  this  use;  it  serves  to  suggest  to  a  careless 
public  a  possible  and  profitable  relation  between 
books  and  the  stage,  the  practicableness  of  bring- 
ing together  fiction  and  the  play.  It  might  be  added 
that  those  who  regard  this  reshaping  of  stories 
into  plays  with  suspicion,  overlook  the  fact  that 
collaboration  was  the  rule  rather  than  the  excep- 
tion in  Shakspere's  day,  and  that  the  most  of  his 
dramas  are  worked-over  stories. 

All  this  is  interesting  and  encouraging.  There 
is  reason  to  think  that,  more  and  more,  we  shall 
see  literature  pushing  its  way  into  the  playhouse; 
and  that,  conversely,  our  poetry  will  take  on  dra- 
matic form.  So  far  back  as  in  the  eighties  Mr. 
Stedman  made  a  prophecy  to  that  effect  in  closing 


J 


62  FORGES   IN  FICTION 

his  study  of  the  American  poets;  and  what  has 
happened  since  justifies  him  in  a  measure.  I  can 
see  plainly  a  desire,  which  is  in  several  instances 
translated  into  attempts  on  the  p^t  oi  the  younger 
verse  writers  in  the  United  States,  to  make  plays 
of  poetic  quality  and  yet  of  dramatic  value.  The 
tentative  work  of  the  late  Eichard  Hovey  is  one 
illustration;  a  recent  effort  of  Mr.  William 
Vaughn  Moody  offers  another.  These,  to  he  sure, 
are  open  to  the  reproach  of  heing  unactahle;  hut 
time  will  teach  technique,  and  the  promise  is  here. 
But  one  thing  in  regard  to  the  dramatic  uses  of 
poetry  must  be  clearly  understood  and  is  most 
often  overlooked ;  namely,  the  drama  can  and  does 
exist  independently  of  any  of  the  embellishments 
of  literature.  The  latter  is  an  ornament,  not  a 
necessity.  By  this  I  mean  that  d^play  can  be  writ- 
ten which  is  skillful  in  construction,  powerful  in 
situations,  brilliant  in  characterization,  without 
having  a  line  in  it  which  deserves  to  live  for  its 
form's  sake.  N'ay,  we  may  go  further  and  say 
that  an  effective  play  can  be  constructed  with 
no  dialogue  at  all — witness  the  much-enjoyed 
French  pantomime  which  appeared  in  this  country 
a  few  years  since.  Every  practical  dramatist  is 
aware  of  what  a  comparatively  small  function 
words  have  in  the  upbuilding  of  a  play,  where  sev- 
eral pages  will  be  given  up  to  an  indication  of  the 
'Hiusiness"  and  to  stage  directions,  while  only  a 
single  sentence  perhaps  is  spoken  by  the  charac- 
ters.   It  is  well  to  bear  down  on  this  point,  be- 


POETRY   AND   THE   DRAMA  63 

cause  conventional  critics  treating  the  earlier 
periods  of  the  literary  drama  talk  as  if  a  play,  to 
be  good,  must  make  enjoyable  closet  reading. 
Nothing  is  further  from  the  truth. 

It  is  very  instructive  to  study  with  this  thought 
in  mind  the  Edwin  Booth  prompt-books  of  the 
Shakspere  plays  enacted  by  that  representative 
American  tragedian.  Booth's  attitude  toward  the 
poet-dramatist  was,  as  is  well-known,  entirely  rev- 
erential; he  was  a  devout  student  of  the  dramas 
of  the  master-genius  of  our  race  in  literature.  He 
would  have  been  the  last  to  countenance  the  arbi- 
trary garbling  and  disfigurement  of  the  plays, 
which  was  not  uncommon  at  the  hands  of  authors 
and  actors  up  to  Garrick's  time.  Yet  he  did  not 
hesitate  to  excide  ruthlessly  passage  after  passage, 
though  of  the  greatest  literary  value,  if  they 
seemed  to  him  non-dramatic — ornamental,  not  i/^ 
vital  to  the  action.  A  couple  of  examples  will 
make  this  plain. 

In  "The  Merchant  of  Venice,"  Bassanio,  in  his 
glowing  description  of  Portia,  has  this  golden 
close : 


—"And  her  sunny  locks 
Hang  on  her  temples  like  a  golden  fleece; 
Which  makes  her  seat  of  Belmont  Colchos'  strand. 
And  many  Jasons  come  in  quest  of  her." 


No  lover  of  literature  would  spare  these  lines; 
yet  Booth  cut  them  out.  Again,  in  "Hamlet"  I, 
the  Queen  in  her  narration  of  Ophelia's  piteous 


OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY 

OF 


64  POnCES  IN  FICTION 

death — the  whole  speech  being  at  the  top  of  the 
poetry  of  pathos — ends  in  this  way: 

"Her  clothes  spread  wide; 
And,  mermaid-like,  awhile  they  bore  her  up; 
Which  time  she  chanted  snatches  of  old  tunes; 
As  one  incapable  of  her  own  distress 
Or  like  a  creature  native  and  indued 
Unto  that  element;    but  long  it  could  not  be 
Till  that  her  garments,  heavy  with  their  drink, 
Pulled  the  poor  wretch  from  her  melodious  lay 
To  muddy  death." 

Here  Booth  omits  what  was  doubtless  to  him  a 
most  lovely  bit  of  description,  but  one  that  too 
long  delayed  the  action  at  the  very  conclusion  of 
the  act.  There  is,  of  course,  nothing  in  this  pe- 
culiar to  Booth ;  the  whole  history  of  the  adapta- 
tion of  Shakspere's  plays  to  modern  conditions 
of  the  stage  illustrates  this  tendency  to  sacrifice 
poetical  adornment  for  strict  dramatic  effect. 
Great  moments  are  to  be  found  in  Shakspere, 
as  in  all  dramatic  literature  of  the  loftiest  kind, 
where  matchless  poetry  and  intensest  drama  of 
the  psychologic  order  unite  in  a  chemical  union; 
these  passages  and  scenes  mark  the  culmination  of 
dramatic  literature.  But  subservient  to  the  pur- 
poses of  dramatic  action,  poetry,  this  fair  hand- 
maid of  the  sterner  business  of  drama,  must  ever 
be.  It  is  a  cheap  begging  of  the  question  to  say 
that  the  reason  Shakspere's  poetry  is  suppressed 
and  only  his  drama  in  the  narrower  sense  retained 
is  because  poetry  has  now  fallen  on  evil  days, 
whereas  in  the  spacious  times  of  Elizabeth  that 


POETRY   AND    THE   DRAMA  65 

highest  expression  of  the  imagination  met  a  sym- 
pathetic response.  Eather  should  it  be  said  that 
we  now  have  a  clearer  conception  of  the  proper 
limits  of  play-making  and  realize  as  never  before 
that  to  block  action  even  by  putting  beauty  in  its 
way  is  bad  technique  in  the  drama.  It  may  be 
remarked  also  that  the  practical  reshaping  of 
many  Shakspere  plays  for  the  purposes  of  modern 
representation  is  a  further  example  of  the  firmer 
dramatic  construction  of  our  day, — not  necessarily 
an  iconoclastic  outrage  at  all.  It  is  true  that  in 
the  stage  history  of  Shakspere  we  find  that  un- 
warranted liberties  have  been  taken  with  his  text, 
with  his  characters,  even  with  the  fundamental 
idea  of  his  dramas,  so  that  a  play  like  "King  Lear" 
is  emasculated  by  a  'Tiappy  ending."  The  period 
of  the  Eestoration  was  a  chief  sinner  in  this  re- 
spect; so  late  as  the  eighteenth  century  an  actor- 
manager  like  Garrick  takes  undue  liberties.  But 
the  adaptations  familiar  in  our  own  time  are  quite 
another  matter.  The  habit  is  justified  by  the  re- 
sults. The  late  Mr.  Daly's  occasional  revivals, 
where  the  dramas  were  presented  intact,  and  which 
were  lauded  to  the  skies  for  their  reverential  spirit 
toward  the  original  text,  in  pleasing  contrast  with 
the  profane  handling  thereof  more  often  seen,  only 
served  to  strengthen  the  argument  in  favor  of 
needed  changes.  Mr.  Mansfield's  rendition  of 
"Henry  V"  offers  a  case  in  point  at  the  present 
writing.  One  who  witnessed  his  performance  with 
the  regular  text  in  hand  was  hard  put  to  it  to  fol- 


66  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

low  the  lines,  so  freely  were  scenes  pulled  about 
and  passages  exeided.  Yet  it  were  foolish  to  deny 
the  gain  in  compression  and  coherence,  this  rebuild- 
ing being  particularly  legitimate  in  the  case  of 
one  of  the  history-chronicle  plays,  which  from 
their  very  nature  are  more  loosely  constructed 
than  a  drama  like  "Hamlet"  or  "Lear"  or  "Mac- 
beth," where  a  deep  psychologic  significance  draws 
the  parts  together  in  a  more  than  molecular  mar- 
riage. The  reader  will  find  a  further  treatment 
of  this  improvement  in  dramatic  technique  in  the 
following  essay. 

This  fact  of  the  separate  aim  of  literature  and 
the  drama  is  no  argument  against  their  union. 
Though  independent,  they  make  the  strongest  of 
allies.  But  it  does  suggest  a  caution  against 
sneering  at  the  so-called  unliterary  drama,  which, 
if  well  done  in  accordance  with  the  laws  of  stage- 
craft, is  admirable  and  fulfills  its  immediate  pur- 
pose. Ah,  yes,  its  immediate  purpose ;  therein  lies 
the  criticism.  If  the  playwright  would  do  more 
than  succeed  at  once;  if  he  would  be  treasured  in 
after  days,  let  him  do  as  did  Shakspere  and  his 
fellows,  Congreve  and  the  Eestoration  men,  Sheri- 
dan and  Goldsmith  in  the  last  century;  and  as 
Ibsen,  Maeterlinck,  Hauptmann,  Sudermann, 
Eostand  and  Stephen  Phillips  are  doing  in  our 
own  time;  let  him,  in  addition  to  human  interest 
and  technical  structure,  bedeck  the  play  in  the  fair 
garments  of  poetry,  be  jewel  it,  as  it  were,  with  the 
ideal,  and  present  the  more  impassioned  moments 


POETRY   AND   THE   DRAMA  67 

of  character  in  language  that  is  fittingly  poetic 
because  at  such  times  life  itself  becomes  lyrical, 
heroic,  dramatic  in  a  noble  sense.  For  it  must  be 
remembered  that  poetry  is,  after  all,  more  than 
ornament;  it  is  stuff  of  the  very  essence  of  a  mo- 
ment when  life  is  at  its  keenest  and  highest  and 
broadest.  There  is  a  poetry  of  situation  on  the 
stage  irrespective  of  language;  and  when  the 
words  used  are  proper  to  the  scene  they  are  far 
more  than  decoration,  being  rather  the  permanent 
registration  through  the  expressional  medium  of 
speech  of  what  were  otherwise  a  fleeting  sight — 
part  of  a  play  that  has  its  run  and  then  ceases 
to  be — ^perhaps  forever.  The  strongest  plea  for 
the  union  of  poetry  and  the  stage  is,  then,  that 
the  poetry  that  is  in  action  in  the  interrelations 
of  human  beings  must  be  fine-languaged  to  get 
itself  all-expressed  and  long-preserved.  Then  shall 
the  play-makers  be  praised  within  the  theatre  and 
also  be  read  with  delight;  and  shall  be  names 
for  children's  children  to  conjure  with.  The 
signs  are  not  few  that  this  laudable  marriage  of 
play  and  poetry  is  taking  place  once  more  in  our 
time,  late  illustrations  being  furnished  by  Ste- 
phen Phillips'  striking  dramatic  rehabilitation 
of  the  old  but  immortally  beautiful  Francesca  da 
Rimini  story  and  his  boldly  fine  handling  of  a 
biblical  motive  in  "Herod." 


THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  TECHNIQUE  IN 
THE  DEAMA 

The  truth  that  the  drama  is  a  form  of  literature 
having  its  own  technique  seems  obvious  enough. 
Yet  if  one  may  judge  by  many  attempts  at  play- 
making  and  much  literary  criticism,  it  is  a  fact 
so  occult  as  to  have  escaped  general  observation. 
It  is  only  of  late,  with  the  great  demand  for  the 
turning  of  alleged  dramatic  fiction  into  play  form, 
that  novelists  as  a  class  have  come  to  accept  the 
idea  that  the  art  of  fiction  is  one,  that  of  the  stage 
another.  Too  often  in  the  past  has  it  been  as- 
sumed that  because  a  piece  of  fiction  is  what  we 
call  "dramatic,^^  it  will  surely  make  a  strong 
play;  that  a  situation  in  a  novel  can  be  trans- 
planted bodily  for  use  upon  the  boards.  Every 
year  still  the  failures  of  dramatised  fiction  are 
to  be  explained  by  this  assumption.  There  is  in 
the  growing  practice  of  calling  on  collaborating 
dramatists  of  practical  experience  for  help,  a  sig- 
nificant admission  by  authors  that  the  lack  of  such 
knowledge  is  likely  to  be  fatal.  The  difference 
in  the  respective  methods  of  fiction  and  the  drama 
is,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  almost  as  great  as  that 
between  essay  and  poetry. 

The  indiscriminating  praise  of  Shakspere, 
master  poet  of  the  race,  reveals  the  same  tendency 
68 


TECHNIQUE    IN    THE    DRAMA  69 

to  overlook  this  fundamental  distinction.  It  has 
become  the  most  threadbare  of  commonplace  to 
allow  to  him  all  the  claims  possible  to  be  filed  by  a 
maker  of  literature.  It  is  a  matter  of  course  to 
deal  only  in  superlatives  when  discoursing  on  the 
Stratford  man.  Hence  has  grown  up  a  habit, 
careless  with  those  who  know  better,  and  ignorant 
and  mistaken  in  the  case  of  critics  who  do  not 
think  for  themselves, — ^the  habit  of  confusing  the 
technique  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  inclusive 
of  Shakspere,  with  the  splendid  poetry  which 
adorned  that  stage  and  makes  it  unique  in  En- 
glish literature. 

Shakspere  was  confronted  with  the  tremendous 
task  of  establishing  the  art  of  play-writing  in 
England;  in  view  of  what  he  found  when  he  be- 
gan, he  performed  a  miracle  in  leaving  dramatic 
technique  what  it  was  when  he  had  rounded  out 
his  mighty  play-cycle  with  the  romances,  "Cymbe- 
line,"  "The  Winter's  Tale,"  and  "The  Tempest." 
To  appreciate  this,  however,  it  is  necessary  to  read 
and  digest  the  precedent  attempts  at  play  litera- 
ture :  the  crude,  coarse  comedies  of  "Ealph  Eoister 
Bolster"  and  "Gammer  Gurton's  Needle;"  the 
frigid  lifelessness  of  "Gorbudoc,"  with  its  slavish 
imitation  of  the  Senecan  models;  the  vital  but 
often  childishly  ineffective  and  shapeless  tragedies 
of  Marlowe; — to  say  nothing  of  the  tentative 
efforts  of  men  like  Peele,  Greene,  Kyd  and  Nash. 
In  comparison,  Shakspere's  plays  seem  to  leap 
Cadmus-like  at  the  creative  word  into  full  strength. 


70  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

But  this  is  all  relative.  Looking  back,  one  sees  that 
the  poet-player  founded  modern  dramatic  method 
and  clothed  it  on  with  a  splendor  unsurpassed ;  hut 
looking  forward  towards  our  own  time,  and  think- 
ing of  play-making  as  such,  he  is  to  he  recognized 
as  a  very  great  journeyman  learning  to  use  his 
tools,  gradually  sloughing  off  excrescences  inevit- 
able to  the  artistic  beginnings  of  any  literary 
craft ;  in  few,  he  exhibits  a  progressive  mastery  of 
technique  marvellous  for  his  day  but  falling  short 
in  many  ways  of  the  perfection  of  dramatic  art 
which  was  to  be  reached  in  the  evolution  of  over 
three  hundred  years.  In  the  creation  of  character, 
in  the  poetic  interpretation  of  human  life,  Shak- 
spere  stands  alone ;  but  in  the  manipulation  of  the 
play-form  for  the  purposes  of  dramatic  exposition, 
he  has  been  left  far  behind.  The  technique  of  an 
Ibsen,  a  Hauptmann,  a  Pinero,  a  Gillette,  is  far 
superior,  if  by  technique  be  meant  the  adaptation 
of  means  to  a  certain  end.  This  sort  of  remark 
is  commonly  heard  when  intelligent  students  come 
together  for  talk,  and  yet  are  they  cautious  of 
saying  it  in  print.  Yet  surely  it  is  no  detraction 
from  Shakspere's  genius  to  make  the  point.  To 
deny  it  is  to  call  Shakspere  not  a  man  but  a  god, 
and  (which  is  worse)  to  set  aside  one  of  the  car- 
dinal principles  of  all  fruitful  literary  criticism; 
namely,  that  literature  is  a  growth,  and  that  even 
genius  has  its  relation  to  environment,  its  limita- 
tions of  time  and  place. 
A  certain  class  of  minds  takes  particular  satisf  ac- 


TECHNIQUE   IN    THE   DRAMA  71 

tion  in  pooh-poohing  art  and  emphasizing  person- 
ality. Shakspere,  it  holds,  could  create  dramatic 
technique  about  as  easily  as  he  could  write  peer- 
less blank  verse.  One  who  adopts  this  as  a  work- 
ing hypothesis  in  the  study  of  literature — or  of 
any  art — will  get  in  a  sad  muddle.  Its  violation 
of  the  idea  of  literature  as  an  organic  growth,  not 
a  fortuitous  combination  of  human  atoms,  makes 
it  untenable  in  a  day  when  the  evolutionary  prin- 
ciple is  so  firmly  founded. 

But  how,  it  may  be  asked,  have  plays  gained  so 
wonderfully  as  to  make  the  best  modern  drama 
more  admirable  than  that  of  the  early  giants? 
What  are  the  improvements  which  mark  technique 
to-day  and  often  make  a  play  an  example  of  fine 
art?  A  study  of  English  stage  literature  from 
>.;  the  late  sixteenth  century  to  the  present  furnishes 
the  answer.  I  shall  try  to  point  out  a  few  of  the 
significant  changes,  the  substantial  gains. 

To  bring  many  particulars  under  a  common 
denominator,  it  may  be  said  that  the  improve- 
ment in  dramatic  method  since  the  Elizabethans 
has  all  been  in  the  direction  of  greater  truth  in 
the  portrayal  of  life;  almost  all  the  changes  have 
been  in  the  interests  of  vraisemblance.  Little  by 
little,  outworn  devices,  antiquated  conventions, 
originally  useful  but  eventually  lacking  life, 
clumsy  attempts  to  depict  what  was  not  demanded 
by  the  dramatic  necessity,  and  features  which  were 
in  reality  only  admitted  because  of  a  confusion  of 
dramatic  form  with  such  other  forms  as  romance 


72  FORGES  IN  'Miction 

or  epic  were  all  dropped  under  a  clearer  apprehen- 
sion of  the  essential  purpose  of  drama, — the  tell- 
ing of  a  story  by  characters  in  action  and  within 
definitely  circumscribed  material  bounds. 

Shakspere  himself  was  a  pioneer  in  this  reform; 
he  ridded  the  stage  of  many  of  the  imperfections 
which  were  clogging  the  development  of  English 
drama.  He  greatly  reduced  the  role  of  the  rhym- 
ing couplet  in  tragedy,  thereby  freeing  the  spirit 
of  poetry  from  a  narrow  and  unnatural  conven- 
tion. He  breathed  the  breath  of  life  under  the 
stark  ribs  of  blank  verse  by  breaking  up  the  full 
line  into  the  irregular  dialogue  which  imitated 
the  very  quiver  of  human  nature.  A  glance  at  the 
pre-Shaksperean  tragedy  with  its  absurdly  unnat- 
ural regularity  of  verse  movement  will  make  this 
plain.  He  excised  the  rambling  episodic  matter 
which  made  those  earlier  plays  a  lumber  room  of 
loose  unrelated  material.  He  went  far  towards 
eliminating  the  chorus,  the  masque,  and  dumb- 
show  features  that,  however  attractive  in  them- 
selves, were  as  millstones  checking  the  free  play  of 
drama.  He  broke  up  the  acts  of  the  play  into 
scenes,  thereby  showing  a  sense  of  the  drama  as 
tableau,  something  consisting  of  successive  stage 
pictures  that  must  compose  even  as  a  picture 
*^^composes.''  He  destroyed  the  tyranny  of  the 
classic  writers  which  up  to  his  coming  fairly 
choked  dramatic  action  and  motive.  By  introduc- 
ing comedy  into  drama  whose  ground  plan  was 


TECHNIQUE   IN   THE   DRAMA  73 

tragic,  he  produced  an  effect  of  reality  never  be- 
fore secured, — a  change  iconoclastic  to  a  degree 
now  difficult  to  appreciate.  He  began  to  denote 
^^Dusiness"  and  to  insert  stage  directions,  his  work 
in  this  respect  being  but  tentative,  a  step  in  the 
right  path.  Students  having  in  hand  one  of  the 
many  modern  editions  of  Shakspere  with  their  full 
equipment  in  the  way  of  change  of  scene,  stage 
direction,  and  business,  and  all  that  goes  to  the 
explication  of  the  text,  would  do  well  to  look  at 
a  fac-simile  reproduction  of  the  First  Folio  of 
1623  in  order  to  realize  how  much  has  been  added 
by  the  editorial  supervision  of  well-nigh  three 
centuries.  But  the  main  fact  is,  that  Shakspere's 
contributions  to  the  advancement,  indeed  the 
founding  of  dramatic  technique,  have  been  many 
and  remarkable. 

iN'evertheless,  the  English  drama  as  he  left  it 
and  as  it  was  handled  by  the  late  and  post-Eliza- 
bethans was  full  of  defects  and  even  absurdities. 
It  was  loosely  constructed,  for  one  important  thing. 
There  was  a  lack  of  unity  which  strikes  the  pres- 
ent-day student  with  astonishment  when  he  ex- 
amines even  a  masterpiece  by  Shakspere  and  finds 
that  it  is  easy  to  shift  the  order  of  the  scenes  to  the 
improvement  of  the  action,  a  closer-knit  and  more 
sequential  effect  being  produced.  The  loose  ar- 
rangement of  the  scenes  in  an  Elizabethan  play 
can  be  explained  in  two  ways;  in  the  first  place,  in 
many  dramas,  especially  the  chronicle  history  plays 
of  which  "Richard  IIP'  and  ''Henry  V"  are  ex- 


74  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

cellent  illustrations,  the  principal  aim  was  to  offer 
a  series  of  more  or  less  loosely  related  spectacles, 
each  effective  in  itself ;  the  author  cared  less  about 
an  organic  story.  The  second  and  chief  reason 
lies  in  the  physical  conditions  of  the  stage  of  that 
time,  the  very  lack  of  scenery  making  scenes  pos- 
sible. For  when  such  a  scenic  change  does  not  call 
for  new  scenery,  there  is  no  managerial  objection 
to  it;  whereas,  if  every  change  means  a  consider- 
able financial  outlay,  the  ambitious  playwright 
will  find  himself  at  loggerheads  with  the  practical 
man  of  the  theatre.  It  is  in  such  material  facts 
that  the  multiplicity  of  scenes  in  many  Eliza- 
bethan dramas — as  high  as  ten  or  a  dozen  to  an 
act  in  some  instances — has  its  origin,  a  crude 
sense  of  art  also  helping  to  bring  about  such  a  re- 
sult. Pass  from  such  plays  to  a  late  modern 
example,  and  you  will  find  an  Ibsen  rarely  allow- 
ing more  than  two  scenes  to  an  act ;  while  Bernard 
Shaw,  who  is  an  extremist  in  the  simplification 
and  perfecting  of  stage  technique,  regularly  makes 
the  scene  co-extensive  with  the  act. 

The  later  Elizabethan  drama  was  also  notable 
for  its  monstrosities  of  plot.  Shakspere,  though 
avoiding  the  worst  of  them,  did  not  hesitate  to 
make  use  of  the  conventions  which  sacrificed  the 
sense  of  realities,  as  in  his  treatment  of  sex  dis- 
guises so  common  from  the  time  of  an  early  piece 
like  "Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona."  In  a  genuinely 
strong  play  like  "The  Merchant  of  Venice"  the  veri- 
similitude is  greatly  injured  by  the  assumption 


TECHNIQUE   IN    THE   DRAMA  75 

that  Portia  in  her  charming  lawyer's  robes  really 
hides  her  identity;  as  a  matter  of  fact,  her  per- 
sonality is  no  more  cloaked  than  is  that  of  a  girl 
college  student  who  as  Commencement  draws  near 
dons  her  Oxford  gown  and  so  lends  a  piquant 
touch  to  the  June  campus.  This  example  may 
serve  to  stand  for  numerous  concessions  on  Shaks- 
pere's  part  to  stage  traditions  antagonistic  to  the 
truthful  interpretation  of  life  in  the  theater.  It 
should  be  remembered,  too,  that  the  custom  of 
boy  actors  for  the  woman  parts  introduced  further 
complications  and  concessions.  Shakspere's  worst 
lapse  in  this  matter  or  in  other  departures  from 
truth  were  as  nothing  compared  with  such  a  con- 
geries of  wild  and  fantastic  horrors  as  is  to  be 
met  with  in  Webster's  "Duchess  of  Malfi/' — a  play, 
which  contains,  notwithstanding,  poetry  as  mag- 
nificent as  can  be  found  in  the  whole  range  of 
Elizabethan  drama.  The  tendency  of  the  post- 
Elizabethans  in  this  matter  of  realism  of  incident 
and  character  and  the  skillful  adjustment  of 
action  to  end,  was  swiftly  downhill. 

But  with  the  drama  of  the  Eestoration  came  an 
improvement.  There  was  a  loss  of  poetry,  of 
the  imaginative  appeal  to  the  abiding  interests 
and  passions.  But  in  technique,  and  given  their 
object,  the  plays  of  Congreve  and  his  mates  cer- 
tainly show  an  advance, — a  dialogue  notably  bet- 
ter in  lifelikeness  and  a  far  abler  handling  of  the 
story,  which  often  is  so  clearly  articulated  that 
effect  flows  from  cause  without  hitch  or  violation 


76  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

of  truth.  To  explain  the  brilliant  reflection  of 
social  manners  seen  in  the  best  known  dramas  of 
Goldsmith  and  Sheridan,  one  must  read  the  earlier 
plays  of  Congreve,  Farquhar,  Van  Brugh  and 
Wycherly.  By  the  time  the  Eestoration  period  is 
reached,  we  have  dispensed  with  much  extraneous 
matter  common  with  the  Elizabethans :  the  inter- 
polated dumb  show,  the  purely  undramatic  masque, 
the  common  use  of  long  descriptive  passages 
which,  however  beautiful,  clogged  action  and  the 
display  of  character;  the  clumsy  introduction  of 
the  supernatural,  as  in  the  closing  act  of  "Cymbe- 
line."  Obviously,  a  part  of  this  change  is  due  to 
the  very  different  nature  of  the  later  drama,  which 
is  a  comedy  of  manners  where  before  was  romantic 
tragedy.  We  have  left  the  world  which  labors 
and  loves  in  the  noble  sense  for  the  little  corrupt 
world  of  town  intrigue  and  pleasure.  But  beyond 
doubt  a  main  reason  is  the  increased  sense  of  what 
the  dramatic  requirements  are.  Dryden's  criticism 
of  the  stage  and  stage  literature  gives  valuable  tes- 
timony to  this  keener  appreciation  in  his  day  of 
the  methods  of  play-writing  that  is  intended  for 
stage  representation. 

Furthermore,  it  were  absurd  to  suppose  that 
with  the  eighteenth  century — including  such  de- 
lightful and  familiar  productions  as  "She  Stoops 
to  Conquer"  and  "The  School  for  Scandals—the 
last  word  in  the  evolution  of  dramatic  method  was 
spoken.  The  aim  in  those  dramas  was  the  exposi- 
tion of  social  types  and  customs, — a  satiric  inten- 


TECHNIQUE  IN   THE  DRAMA  *t1 

tion;  hence  brilliant  dialogue  and  clearcut  por- 
traiture within  definitely  prescribed  limits.  But 
the  story  invented  to  carry  these  characteristics  is, 
compared  with  the  ingenious  inventions  of  later 
playwrights  and  the  vital  imaginings  of  a  few, 
thin,  slight  and  not  seldom  unconvincing  enough. 
An  impression  of  talk  at  the  expense  of  action  is 
conveyed,  overcome  partially,  at  least,  in  our  day 
by  casting  the  piece  with  such  capable  actors  that 
their  superb  art  makes  us  forget  defects  of  com- 
position. Yet  the  Bancrofts  in  London,  con- 
fronted by  these  facts,  did  not  hesitate  to  edit 
'^The  School  for  Scandal."  In  witnessing  the  fa- 
mous screen  scene  in  that  drama,  it  is  impossible 
not  to  feel  the  conventionality  and  flimsiness  of  the 
situation,  if  one  will  but  fix  the  mind  on  the  play 
rather  than  upon  the  acting  itself.  All  this  comes 
out  clearly  in  a  performance  of  the  play  by  ama- 
teurs; there  is  little  in  the  piece  to  carry  it  of 
itself.  It  needs  resourceful  players;  whereas, 
Pinero's  "Sweet  Lavender,"  or  Grundy's  "A  Pair 
of  Spectacles"  are  comedies  which  give  pleasure  if 
enacted  by  high  school  students.  Indifferent  or 
bad  acting  cannot  kill  them. 

The  complete  disappearance  of  the  chorus,  an- 
other classic  tradition  often  used  by  Shakspere, 
is  a  mark  of  modern  work  that  has  its  significance. 
It  means  that  for  strict  dramatic  purposes,  com- 
ment, no  matter  if  it  be  the  beautiful  Ijrric  com- 
ment of  the  Attic  drama,  is  an  excrescence.  The 
theory  of  dramatic  art  which  admits  of  choragic 


78  FORCES  IN   FICTION 

interpolation  is  entirely  contrary  to  present-day 
ideas.  If  the  aim  be  poetic  justice  in  the  interpre- 
tation of  life,  this  custom  may  still  be  defended; 
the  Japanese  use  it  now  in  their  drama.  But  with 
the  stern  insistence  on  action  as  the  kernel  of 
drama,  it  had  to  go,  to  the  palpable  advantage  of 
dramatic  effect.  But  the  crowds  in  the  background 
of  melodramas  and  historical  tragedies  and  some- 
times of  romantic  comedies,  clusters  of  people  who 
shout  in  unison  or  become  vocal  through  a  spokes- 
man, are  plainly  a  survival  of  the  Greek  chorus. 
It  is  instructive,  therefore,  to  notice  how  they  are 
got  rid  of  in  the  best  constructed  current  drama. 
Of  course  in  historical  plays  and  all  dramas  of 
strong  scenic  possibilities  the  supernumerary  is 
more  likely  to  appear  and  has  a  sort  of  justifica- 
tion as  picturesque  accessory.  But  on  the  whole 
the  most  masterly  drama  of  to-day  handles  this 
attenuated  chorus  gingerly  if  at  all.  Its  free  use 
even  in  the  spectacular  play-work  of  a  Sardou  now 
makes  an  impression  of  old-fashionedness. 

The  cutting  out  of  episodic  material  is  an  im- 
portant element  in  this  bettering  of  technique. 
The  so-called  induction  of  the  Elizabethans  is  ill 
tolerated  at  present ;  only  as  the  prologue  in  plays 
sensationally  incident-full.  The  Christopher  Sly 
episode  in  Shakspere's  "Taming  of  the  Shrew*^ 
is  a  case  in  point.  In  most  modem  representa- 
tions it  is  omitted;  in  that,  for  example,  made 
familiar  to  Americans  by  the  Daly  company.  In 
the  staging  of  the  piece  by  Miss  Ada  Kehan  this 


TECHNIQUE   IN    THE   DRAMA  79 

induction  was  restored,  no  doubt  to  the  amuse- 
ment of  the  audiences  which  enjoyed  the  unctuous 
humor  of  the  scene,  but  just  as  truly  to  the  detri- 
ment of  the  main  action ;  for  the  purpose  of  a  first 
act, — to  begin  the  story, — is  obscured  when  the 
mind  is  thus  started  on  a  wrong  scent,  however 
attractive  the  game.  A  sense  of  irritation  is  pro- 
duced on  the  realization  that  here  is  a  play  within 
a  play  without  Hamlet's  excuse.  Spencer's  law  of. 
the  economy  of  attention  would  explain  the  wrong 
to  dramatic  construction  here  done. 

The  general  adjustment  of  costume  to  imper- 
sonation during  the  development  of  the  drama 
was  but  an  outward  and  visible  sign  of  that  gen- 
eral approximation  to  life  itself  on  the  stage  al- 
ready explained.  With  the  Elizabethans,  veri- 
similitude of  dress,  like  verisimilitude  of  scenery, 
was  little  sought.  Money  was  spent  freely  at 
times,  especially  on  court  masques  and  revels. 
More  money  was  paid  for  a  velvet  cloak  than  for 
the  copyright  of  a  play.  But  the  sense  of  his- 
torical accuracy  or  the  desire  to  copy  social  exter- 
nals hardly  existed.  Wild  absurdities  of  costume 
are  to  be  noted  in  all  stages  of  the  English  drama 
from  the  morality  plays  to  the  modern  period ;  so 
late  as  the  eighteenth  century  the  dresses  of  the 
ladies  in  a  classical  play  were  wholly  of  the  age  of 
powder  and  patches.  There  was  likewise  small 
demand  at  first  for  that  truth  of  dialogue  which 
means  that  each  person  of  the  play  shall  properly 
pronounce  words  suitable  to  his  or  her  station, 


so  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

dialectic  variations  from  normal  English  being 
given  with  exquisite  exactitude  and  great  skill  by 
the  players.  The  rendering  of  the  rustic  speech 
of  New  England  in  a  play  like  Heme's  ^'^Shore 
Acres/'  of  that  of  the  South  in  Mr.  Thomas's  ''Ala- 
bama" or  of  provincial  England  in  ''Tess"  is  so 
far  superior  to  the  clumsy  phonetics  of  the  early 
drama  as  to  take  on  the  importance  of  a  new  art. 
Compare  with  the  best  examples  of  this  care  in 
the  reproduction  of  speech  on  the  stage,  the  at- 
tempt in  Shakspere's  "Henry  Y"  to  give  the  dia- 
lects of  the  Welsh,  Irish  and  Scotch  soldiers,  and  a 
realization  of  the  difference,  the  immense  progress, 
will  be  gained. 

Truth  of  scene  has  gone  hand  in  hand  with 
truer  costume  and  speech  in  the  modern  play. 
The  illusion  wrought  by  placing  the  dramatis 
personae  in  a  congruous  environment,  is  a  very 
great  aid  in  impressing  the  auditor  with  a  sense 
of  life.  The  objections  so  often  urged  against  the 
elaborateness  of  modern  scenery  are  all  aimed  at 
the  abuse  of  a  good  thing, — ^the  overwhelming  of 
action  by  ornament.  To  argue,  as  some  critics  do, 
that  there  might  have  been  more  appeal  to  the 
imagination — and  hence  as  a  result  more  appre- 
ciation of  dramatic  poetry, — ^in  the  bare  acces- 
sories of  the  Elizabethan  stage,  seems  to  be  a 
scholar's  fad  rather  than  a  reasonable  objection  to 
such  stage-setting  as  shall  make  for  illusion.  The 
consideration  of  a  play  as,  among  other  things,  a 
pictorial  appeal,  has  its  psychological  side.    In  a 


TECHNIQUE   IN    THE   DRAMA  81 

recent  paper,  Mr.  Thomas,  a  well  known  native 
playwright,  dilated  upon  the  modern  dramatist's 
recognition  of  the  necessity  of  carefully  studied 
color  schemes  in  the  successive  scenes  of  a  play, 
relative  to  the  nature  of  the  drama  itself :  making 
the  point  that  a  play  might  be  made  or  marred  ac- 
cording as  the  dramatist  kept  this  requirement  in 
mind.  Many  such  a  finesse  is  given  due  weight 
in  latter  day  dramatic  technique. 

One  of  the  most  persistent  of  stage  conventions 
is  the  "aside ;"  its  effect  is  always  to  destroy  illu- 
sion, and  in  plays  of  our  d^y  whenever  it  is  used 
the  auditor  simply  concedes  to  the  playwright  a 
departure  from  realism  for  the  sake  of  conven- 
ience. To  speak  lines  nominally  sotto  voce  in  such 
tones  as  shall  be  heard  from  every  seat  of  a  large 
I  theater  and  are  yet  ex  hypothesi  not  overheard  by 
I  sundry  persons  on  the  stage,  is  an  absurdity  only 
tolerated  for  its  supposed  helpfulness  in  explain- 
ing the  situation  or  explicating  the  plot.  In  the 
I  best  modern  dramas  the  "aside"  is  coming  to  be 
used  more  and  more  charily;  by  Ibsen,  for  in- 
stance, in  his  social  satires.  In  an  occasional  play 
—this  is  true  of  William  Gillette's  "Held  By  The 
Enemy,"  "Secret  Service,"  and  "Sherlock  Holmes" 
— this  time-honored  device  is  entirely  dispensed 
with.  The  additional  demand  on  the  author's 
ingenuity  is  apparent,  but  the  gain  in  truthful- 
ness and  so  in  strength  of  impression,  well  repays 
the  effort.  It  is  safe  to  say  that  modern  technique 
will  fast  eliminate  the  "aside." 


82  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

Much  the  same  evolution  may  be  traced  in  the 
matter  of  the  soliloquy.  But  here  a  complete 
abandonment  of  a  stage  trick  which  is  inimical 
to  lifelikeness,  is  harder  and  slower,  for  there  is 
a  certain  psychologic  justification  for  it,  not 
found  at  all  in  the  case  of  the  "aside."  People 
think  out  their  situations  when  alone,  and  to  give 
those  thoughts  vocal  utterance  is  a  pardonable 
objectifying  of  a  common  subjective  experience. 
Moreover,  people  actually  do  soliloquize  when 
under  mental  or  emotional  strain;  many  of  us 
know  this  from  our  own  habit.  Still,  clever  play- 
wrights to-day  are  reducing  the  role  of  the  solil- 
oquy in  a  marked  way,  and  now  and  then  its  total 
disappearance  in  a  play  is  to  be  chronicled.  Here 
again  Mr.  Gillette  is  in  the  van,  his  dramas  al- 
ready mentioned  being  constructed  without  a  con- 
cession to  a  convention  which  in  Shakspere  is  in- 
wrought with  the  very  texture  of  the  dramaturgic 
effect. 

The  reduction  in  the  number  of  the  persons  of 
the  play  and  the  simplification  of  the  act  divisions 
are  still  other  tendencies  of  modern  technique. 
Glance  at  a  typical  Ibsen  drama  and  see  how  pre- 
vailingly the  piece  is  cast  for  six  or  eight  parts. 
In  "Ghosts"  the  number  is  but  five ;  which  is  also 
true  of  English  playwrights  like  Pinero.  Com- 
pare this  restriction  with  the  Elizabethan  habit. 
The  contrast  is  startling.  The  exceptions  to  this 
rule  are  found  in  historical  dramas  like  Eostand^s 
'Ti'Aiglon"  with  its  fifty  and  more  persons;    or 


TECHNIQUE   IN    THE   DRAMA  83 

Sardou's  "Eobespierre/'  with  hardly  a  less  number. 
In  these  there  is  really  a  reversal  to  older 
methods, — a  tendency  in  the  last  named  plays  ex- 
tending to  the  use  of  six  acts.  The  evolution  in 
the  habit  of  division  into  acts  has  been  steadily 
towards  a  reduction  of  the  number.  With  the 
Greeks  the  play  fell  into  episodes  rather  than  into 
acts  in  the  modern  sense.  Nowadays,  while  the 
old  distribution  into  five  acts  allowing  for  the  in- 
troduction, growth,  height,  fall  and  catastrophe 
is  still  found  in  heavy  tragedy,  comedy  has  shrunk 
to  a  customary  three  acts,  and  tragedy  that  deals 
with  contemporary  persons  and  scenes  either  to 
three  or  four,  with  a  preference  in  romantic  plays 
with  heavily  dramatic  situations  for  four.  Nor 
is  this  change  arbitrary.  It  indicates  a  feeling  for 
simplification  which  recognizes  the  tripartite  life 
in  a  properly  built  play,  it  being  a  creature  hav- 
ing a  beginning,  middle,  and  end,  the  additional 
act  being  in  reality  a  subdivision  of  the  second  act. 
Since  this  scheme  of  construction  is  fundamental, 
it  seems  likely  that  technique  will  come  to  settle  on 
three  acts  as  the  normal  arrangement,  a  departure 
therefrom  being  due  to  special  needs  or  restric- 
tions— as  in  the  case  of  the  historical  play  which, 
like  the  historical  novel,  has  a  method  all  its  own. 
Even  from  this  rapid  coup  d'oeil  at  the  devel- 
opment of  dramatic  technique  it  can  be  under- 
stood that  we  have  here  a  healthy  growth  which 
has  now  reached  a  high  degree  of  perfected  art. 
To  turn  the  back  on  present-day  play-making  as 


84  FORCES   IN  FICTION     , 

if  it  had  no  interest,  the  dramatic  glories  of  the 
past  being  alone  worth  while^,  is  a  foolish  phase  of 
conservatism.  It  arises  in  part  from  the  confusion 
of  two  separate  things,  drama  and  literature, 
which,  however  happy  in  their  marriage,  are  inde- 
pendent organisms.  It  is  one  of  the  encouraging 
signs  of  current  drama  that  along  with  an  im- 
mense improvement  in  technique,  is  now  to  be 
noted  such  cultivation  of  the  literary  aspects  of 
the  play,  as  is  giving  the  stage^dramas  enjoyable 
not  only  in  actual  presentation  but  for  private 
reading.  If  we  may  never  again  expect  the 
creative  genius  of  a  Shakspere,  surely  we  have 
some  compensation  in  the  truthful  portrayal  of 
human  life  on  the  stage  and  in  the  abler  manipu- 
lation of  stage  artifice  to  bring  about  that  very 
desirable  result. 


THE  ESSAY  AS  MOOD  AND  FOEM 

It  is  odd  that  while  the  essay  as  a  distinctive 
form  in  modern  literature  is  so  well  cherished  and 
enjoyable,  it  has  received  so  little  of  expert  atten- 
tion. Books  upon  the  drama,  upon  poetry  in  its 
many  phases,  upon  the  novel  even — a  thing  com- 
paratively of  but  yesterday— T-are  as  leaves  on 
Vallombrosa  for  number;  but  books  on  the  essay 
— where  are  they?  It  is  high  time  the  natural 
history  of  the  essay  was  written,  for_here  is  a 
fascinating  literary  development  which  has  had  a 
vigorous,  distinguished,  life  of  more  than  three 
hundred  years  in  English  and  which  counts 
among  its  cultivators  some  of  the  abiding  names^ 
in  our  native  literature.  Here  is  a  form,  too,  in- 
teresting because  of  its  inter-filiations  with  such 
other  forms  as  fiction  which  is  connected  with  it 
by  the  bridge  of  the  character-sketch;  drama, 
whose  dialogue  the  essay  not  seldom  uses;  and 
such  later  practical  offshoots  as  the  newspaper 
editorial  and  the  book  review. 

This  neglect  of  the  essay  is  not  altogether  in- 
explicable. Scholars  have  been  shy  of  it,  I  fancy, 
in  part  at  least,  because  on  the  side  of  form  (the 
natural  and  proper  side  to  consider  in  studying 
the  historical  evolution  of  a  literary  genre)  it  has 
been  thus  fluent  and  expansive:  a  somewhat  sub- 
85 


86  FORGES   IN   FICTION 

tie,  elusive  thing.  We  can  say,  obviously,  that  an 
essay  is  a  prose  composition,  but  can  we  be  more 
expiicTFEEan  this  fatheiTgross  mark  of  identifica- 
tion? The  answer  is  not  so  easy.  Moreover,  the 
question  has  become  further  confused  by  a  change 
in  the  use  and  meaning  of  the  word  within  a 
century.  A  cursory  glance  at  the  history  of  the 
English  essay  will  make  this  plain. 

Lord  Bacon  was,  by  his  own  statement,  fond  of 
that  passed  master  of  the  essay  in  French,  Mon- 
taigne. It  is  small  wonder  then  that,  when  at  the 
endof  the  sixteenth  cenfair.YJie-j).ut  a  na.me-tQ  his 
'^dispersed  meditations,"  _he^  called  them  essays, 
after  the  Frenchinan,  using  the  word  for  the  first 
time  in  our  tongue.  Not  the  name  only  but  the 
thing  was  new.  The  form  was  slight,  the  ex- 
pression pregnant  and  epigrammatic;  there  was 
no  attempt  at  completeness.  ThQ,  aim  ..ojihis 
early  prince  of  _essay.is±s„.w.as.  to  ^ -suggestive 
rather  than  exhaustive — the  latter  a  term  too 
often  S3rnonymous  with  exhausting.  Bacon's 
essays  imply_expanded  note-book  jottings ;  indeed, 
he  so  regarded  them.  In  the  matter  of  style,  one 
has  but  to  read  contemporaries  like  Sidney,  Lyly 
and  Hooker,  to  see  to  what  an  extent  Lord  Bacon 
modernized  the  cumbersome,  though  often  cloud- 
ily splendid,  Elizabethan  manner.  He  clarified 
and  simplified  the  prevailing  diction,  using 
shorter  words  and_cri&per_  sentences  with  the  re- 
sult of  closer  knit,  more  sententious  effect.  In  a 
word,  ~S^tyIeTecame  more  idiomatic,  and  the  re- 


THE   ESSAY   AS   MOOD   AND    FORM        87 

lation  of  author  and  reader  more  intimate  in  the 
hands  of  this  Elizabethan  essay-maker.  The  point 
is  full  of  significance  for  the  history  of  this  al- 
luring form;  its  development  ever  since  has  been 
from  this  initiative.  SHght^ca^al^_^rambling, 
confidential  in  tone,  the  manner  much,  the  lEEerae 
unimportant  in  itself,  a  mood  to  be  vented  rather 
than  a  thought  to^add  to  the  sum  of  human 
knowledge'l^iEeTrankj^evelation  of  a  personality 
— suchTiave  been  and  are  the  head  marks  of  the 
essay  down  to  the  present  day.  This  fact  is  some- 
what obscured  by  our  careless  use  of  the  word  at 
present  to  denote  the  formal  paper,  the  treatise: 
the  current  definition  of  the  essay  admits  this  ex- 
tension, and  of  course  we  bandy  the  word  about  in 
such  meaning.  But  it  is  well  to  remember  that 
the  central  idea  of  this  form  is  what  removes  it 
forever  from  the  treatise,  from  any  piece  of  .writ- 
ing that  is  formal,  impersonal  and  communicative 
of  information.  uLittle_was  done  for  the  develop- 
ment of  the  essay,  after  Bacon,  during  the  seven- 
teenth century.  But.  with  Addison,  Steele  and  the 
Spectator  in  the  early  eighteenth,  the  idea  is  re- 
inforced and  some  of  the  essential  features  of  this 
form'Frought  the  more  clearly  out.  The  social, 
chatty  quality  of  the  true  essayist  is  emphasized; 
the  writer  ent^r^lnto  mpre  confidential  relations 
with  Jiis  reader  Jhan  ever  he  did  with  the  stately 
Verulam;  and  the  style  approaches  more  nearly 
to  the  careless,  easy  elegance  of  the  talk  of  good, 
but  not  stiff  society.     The  Spectator  papers  un- 


88  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

questionably  did  more  to  shape  the  mold  of  essay 
writing  in JEnglish  than  any  other  influence ;  at 
the  same  time,  to  speak  as  if  Mr.  Bickerstaff 
originated  the  form  (as  some  critics  do),  is  to 
overlook  its  origin  with  Bacon.  The  essay  idea — 
this  colloquial,  dramatic,  esoteric,  altogether 
charming  sort  of  screed,  was  cultivated  quite 
steadily  through  the  eighteenth  century.  It  be- 
came, as  a  rule,  more  ponderous  in  the  hands  of 
Johnson  and  was  in  danger  of  taking  on  a  didac- 
tic, hortatory  tone  foreign  to  its  nature ;  yet  occa- 
sionally in  the  ^^Eambler"  papers,  Johnson  takes 
on  a  lightness  of  touch  and  tone  that  is  surpris- 
ing and  suggests  that  we  have  perhaps  regarded 
the  dictator  as  too  exclusively  a  wielder  of  ses- 
quipedalian words.  That  this  God  of  the  Coffee 
House  had  a  clear  and  correct  idea  of  the  essay 
is  shown  by  his  own  description  of  it:  "A  loose 
sally  of  the  mind,"  he  says,  "an  irregular,  indi- 
gested piece,  not  a  regular  and  orderly  perform- 
ance." 

Goldsmith,  a  light-horse  soldier  in  contrast  with 
Johnson,  full  panoplied  and  armed  cap-a-pie, 
broadened  the  essay  for  literary  and  social  discus- 
sion, although  Grub  Street  necessity  led  him  at 
times  to  become  encyclopedic;  and  he  was  never 
happier  than  when,  as  in  "The  Ee very  at  the  Boar's 
Head"  he  played  upon  some  whimsical  theme, 
pizzicato,  surcharging  it  with  his  genial  person- 
ality. Minor  writers,  too,  in  the  late  eighteenth 
century  had  a  hand  in  the  development;  none 


THE  ESSAY  AS   MOOD   AND   FORM        89 

more  so,  to  my  mind,  than  the  letter  and  fiction 
makers,  Chesterfield  and  Walpole,  Lady  Mary 
Wortley  Montagu  and  Fanny  Burney — these  and 
that  inimitable  fuss  and  chronicler,  Boswell.  If 
one  would  know  how  society  talked  in  the  second 
half  of  that  Tea  Cup  century,  one  must  read — ^not 
the  dialogue  of  the  novelists  where  the  art  is  too 
new  to  have  caught  quite  the  accent  of  life,  but 
these  off-hand  epistles  dashed  off  without  a 
thought  of  print — to  print  were  half  way  vulgar 
then — and  hence  possessing  all  the  freshness  and 
naturalness  of  life  itself, — ^the  ideal  essay  note. 
We  may  be  thankful  that  as  yet  the  habit  of  pub- 
lishing everything,  from  one's  thrills  to  one's  table 
tastes,  had  not  gained  popularity, — those  ladies 
and  gentlemen  could  afford  to  be  charmingly  un- 
reserved in  their  private  correspondence.  To-day 
in  the  very  act  of  penning  a  note,  intrudes  the 
horrid  thought  that  it  may  be  incorporated  as  an 
integral  part  of  one's  "works." 

The  Letter,  as  a  literary  form,  offers  an  inter- 
esting line  of  side  inquiry  in  connection  with  the 
essay;  it  has  influenced  that  form  beyond  doubt, 
is  in  a  sense  contributory  to  it.  In  the  same  way 
dialogue — a  modern  instance  like  Landor  comes  to 
mind — ^has  had  its  share  in  shaping  so  protean  a 
form. 

But  it  wasreserved  for  the  nineteenth  century 
to  contribute  in  the  person  of  Charles  Lamb  the 
most  brilliant  exemplar  of  the  essay,  prince  of 
this    special    literary    mood;    not    primarily    a 


90  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

thinker,  a  knowledge-bringer,  a  critic,  but  just  a 
unique  personality  expressing  his  ego  in  his  own 
fascinating  way,  making  the  past  pay  rich  toll, 
yet  always  himself;  and  finding  the  essay  accom- 
modative of  his  whimsical  vagaries,  his  delicious 
inconsistencies,  his  deep-toned,  lovable  nature. 
And  that  incomparable  manner  of  his!  ^Tis  at 
once  richly  complex  and  tremulously  simple;  an 
instrument  of  wide  range  from  out  whose  keys  a 
soul  vibrant  to  the  full  meaning  of  humanity 
might  call  spirits  of  earth  and  heaven  in  exquisite 
evocations  and  cadences  at  times  almost  too  pierc- 
ing sweet.  Turn  to  the  Elia  papers  and  see 
how  perfectly  this  magic  of  Lamb's  illustrates  and 
supports  the  qualities  of  mood  and  form  I  am 
naming  as  typical  of  the  essay  as  an  historic 
growth.  The  themes,  how  desultory,  audacious, 
trivial,  even  grotesque.  The  only  possible  justi- 
fication for  a  dissertation  on  roast  pig  is  the  paper 
itself.  Note,  too,  how_brief  some  of  the  choicest 
essays  are;  half  a  dozen  small  pages,  even  less; 
and  with  whajt-^efiioing.  carelessness  they  vary, 
stretching  themselves  at  will  to  "four  times  their 
normal  length.  Study  the  construction  of  any 
famous  essay  to  see  if  it  can  be  called  close-knit, 
organic,  and  you  shall  find  a  lovely  disregard  of 
any  such  intention.  The  immortal  Mrs.  Battle 
on  whist  gives  a  capital  example.  If  you  turn  to 
the  end  of  that  inimitable  deliverance,  you  will 
find  it  to  contain  one  of  the  most  charming  digres- 
sions in  all  literature.     Lamb  leaves  that  deli- 


THE   ESSAY   AS   MOOD   AND   FORM        91 

cious  old  gentlewoman  for  a  moment  to  speak  of 
Cousin  Bridget,  Bridget  Elia,  the  tragic  sister 
Mary  of  his  house,  and  playfully,  tenderly,  pictur- 
ing their  game  at  cards,  forgets  all  else  and  never 
returns  to  Mrs.  Battle.  But  who  cares?  Is  not 
lack  of  organic  connection  (to  call  it  by  so  harsh 
a  name)  more  than  justified  by  that  homely- 
heartful  picture  of  Charles  and  Mary  Lamb,  bent 
over  their  ^^mere  shade  of  play/^ — a  game  not  for 
shillings  but  for  fun — ^nay,  for  love.  ^^Bridget 
and  I  should  be  ever  playing,'^  says  he,  and  the 
reader  is  charmed  and  stirred  clean  out  of  all 
thought  of  Mrs.  Battle.  It  is  ever  so  with  your 
essayist  to  the  manner  born!  to  wander  and 
digress  is  with  him  a  natural  right.  He  is  never 
happier  than  when  he  is  playing  mad  pranks  with 
logic,  respectability  and  the  mother  tongue.  Yet 
should  his  temperament  be  sensitive,  his  nature 
I  broad,  deep  and  noble.  The  querulous-gentle 
Elia  was  surely  of  this  race. 

To  turn  from  Lamb  to  any  contemporary  is  an 
effect  of  anticlimax.  None  other  was  like  to  him 
for  quality.  Yet  Hazlitt  and  Hunt  were  his 
helpers,  doing  good  work  in  extending  the  gamut 
of  this  esoteric  mood  in  literature.  DeQuincy,  too, 
though  losing  the  essay  touch  again  and  again  be- 
cause of  didacticism  and  a  sort  of  formal,  stately 
eloquence,  wrote  papers  in  the  true  tradition  of 
the  essayist.  Passages  in  the  ^^Opium  Eater"  are 
of  this  peculiar  tone  and  that  great  writer's  in- 
tehse  subjectivity  is  always  in  his  favor — since 


Ik 


92  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

the  genuine  essay-maker  must  be  frankly  an 
egoist.  Hunt  is  at  times  so  charming,  so  light  of 
touchy  so  atmospheric  in  quality  that  he  deserves 
to  be  set  high  among  essayists  of  the  early  century. 
A  man  who  could  produce  such  delicately  graceful 
vignette  work  as  his  sketches  of  the  Old  Lady  and 
the  Old  Gentleman,  was  a  true  commensal  of 
Lamb.  In  such  bits  of  writing  the  mood  and 
manner  are  everything,  the  theme  is  naught;  the 
man  back  of  the  theme  is  as  important  in  the  pro- 
duction of  the  essay  as  is  the  man  back  of  the 
gun  in  warfare.  Herein  lies  Hunt's  chief  claim 
on  our  grateful  remembrance — ^here,  and  in  cer- 
tain of  his  verses,  rather  than  in  the  more  elab- 
orate papers  to  be  found  in  such  a  volume  as 
"Fancy  and  Imagination.'' 

But  already  we  must  begin  to  recognize  in 
writers  like  Hunt,  Hazlitt  and  DeQuincy,  and 
still  more  in  latter  men,  a  tendency  distinctly 
modern  and  on  the  whole  antagonistic  to  the  pe- 
culiar virtues  of  the  esoteric  essay,  the  causerie  of 
literature.  It  is  moving  fast  toward  the  objec- 
tive, rounded  out,  formally  arranged  treatise.  It 
becomes  argumentative,  critical,  acquisitive, 
logical,  expository,  laden  with  thought.  Hence 
when  we  reach  masters  like  Euskin,  Carlyle, 
Arnold,  we  see  what  is  natural  to  them  as  essay- 
ists in  one  sense  deflected  into  other  (and  no 
doubt  quite  as  welcome)  forms;  one  and  all,  they 
have  messages,  and  missions.  Now  your  bona  fide 
essayist  has  nothing  of  the  kind ;  he  would  simply 


THE   ESSAY   AS   MOOD   AND   FORM        93 

button-hole  you  for  a  half  hour  while  he  talks 
garrulously,  without  a  thought  of  purpose,  about 
the  world — and  himself — especially  the  latter. 
Splendid  blooms  grow  from  out  the  soil  which 
gives  us  our  Ruskins  and  Carlyles;  but  when  we 
are  considering  this  sensitive  plant  of  the  literary 
garden,  the  essay,  it  were  well  to  agree  that  it  is 
another  thing,  and  to  save  for  its  designation  the 
word  essay.  Nor  is  this  to  deny  essay  touches, 
essay  moments,  essay  qualities  to  Ruskin  or 
Carlyle;  it  is  only  to  make  the  point  that  their 
strenuous  aim  and  habitual  manner,  so  far  as  they 
went,  were  against  the  production  of  a  very  dif- 
ferent kind  of  literature. 

Earlier^  American  literature  has  at  least  sup- 
plied one  real  essayist  to,  th^  general  body  of  Eng- 
lish literature, — the  genial  Irving,  who  was 
nurtured  on  the  best  eighteenth  century  models 
and  carried  on  the  tradition  of  the  Spectator  and 
Goldsmith  in  papers  which  have  just  the  desired 
tone  of  genteel  talk,  the  air  of  good  society.  There 
are  hints  in  Benjamin  Franklin  that  had  politics 
not  engulfed  him,  as  they  afterward  did  Lowell, 
he  might  have  shown  himself  to  the  essay  born. 
Irving  is  sometimes  spoken  of  as  a  fictionist,  but 
all  his  stories  have  the  essay  mood  and  manner; 
and  he  had  the  good  sense  practically  never  to 
abandon  that  gentle  genre.  His  work  always 
possesses  the  essay  touch  both  in  description  and 
in  the  hitting  off  of  character,  thus  offering  an 
illustration  of  the  fact  that  the  essay,  by  way  of 


94  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

the  character  sketch,  debouches  -apon  the  broad 
and  beaten  highway  of  the  novel, — the  main  road 
of  onr  modern  literature.  There  are  plenty  of  Irv- 
ing's  papers  which  it  is  rather  puzzling  to  name 
as  essay  or  fiction;  ",The  Fat  Gentleman,"  for  ex- 
ample. A  later  and  very  true  American  essayist, 
Dr.  Holmes,  furnishes  the  same  puzzle  in  the 
Autocrat  series:  they  have  dialogue,  dramatic 
characterization,  even  some  slight  story  interest. 
Why  not  fiction  then?  Because  the  trail  of  the 
genuine  essayist  is  everywhere ;  the  characters,  the 
dramatic  setting,  are  but  devices  for  the  freer  ex- 
pression of  Dr.  Holmes's  own  delightful  person- 
ality, which,  as  Mr.  Howells  testifies.  Holmes  liked 
to  objectify.  It  is  our  intimate  relation  with  him 
that  we  care  about  in  converse  with  the  essayist 
born;  we  sit  down  to  enjoy  his  views.  The  fic- 
tionist's  purpose,  contrariwise,  is  to  show  life  in  a 
representative  section  of  it  and  with  dramatic  in- 
terplay of  personalities  moving  to  a  certain 
crescendo  of  interest  called  the  climax. 

And  so  Dr.  Holmes  remains  one  of  our  most 
distinctive  and  acceptable  essayists  of  the  social 
sort — ^possessing,  I  mean,  that  gift,  perhaps  best 
seen  with  the  French,  of  making  vivid  one's  sense 
of  one's  relation  to  other  men  and  women  in  the 
social  organism.  It  is  the  triumph  of  this  kind 
of  essay  to  be  at  once  individualistic  and  social; 
without  eccentricity,  on  the  one  hand,  or  vulgarity, 
on  the  other.  Vulgarity,  by  the  way,  is  a  quality 
impossible  to  the  heaven-called  essayist;  it  can  be 


THE  ESSAY  AS   MOOD   A77D   FORM        95 

better  tolerated  in  poetry  even.  For  the  intimacy 
between  the  essayist  and  his  reader  (I  say  reader 
rather  than  audience  with  a  feeling  that  the  re- 
lation is  a  sort  of  solitude  a  deux)  is  greater  than 
in  the  case  of  any  other  form  of  literary  expres- 
sion ;  hence,  when  one  enters,  as  it  werC;,  the  inner 
rooms  of  a  friend's  honse,  any  hint  of  the  home 
is  the  more  quickly  detected,  the  more  snrely  in- 
sufferable. 

The  voice  of  a  natural  essayist  like  Thoreau  is 
somewhat  muffled  by  being  forced  now  and  then 
into  the  public  pulpit  manner.  Yet  an  essay- 
writer  by  instinct  he  certainly  is ;  particularly  in 
his  journal,  but  often  in  the  more  formal 
chroniclings  of  his  unique  contact  with  nature. 
In  Emerson,  too,  we  encounter  a  writer  with  a  vo- 
cation for  the  essay,  but  having  other  fish  to  fry, — 
doubtless  a  loftier  aim  but  a  different.  No  man, 
English  or  American,  has  a  literary  manner  which 
makes  the  essay  an  inspired  chat  more  than  the 
Concord  sage-singer ;  and  the  inspired  chat  comes 
close  to  being  the  beau  ideal  of  your  true-blue 
essayist.  With  less  strenuousness  of  purpose  and 
just  a  bit  more  of  human  frailty — or  at  least 
sympathy  with  the  frail, — ^here  were  indeed  a 
prince  in  this  kind ! 

How  much  of  the  allurement  of  the  essay  style 
did  Lowell  keep,  however  scholarlike  his  quest, 
in  papers  literary,  historical,  even  philological! 
In  a  veritable  essay-subject  like  ^^On  a  Certain 
Condescension  in  Foreigners,"  he  displays  himself 


L 


96  F0RCE8   IN  FICTION 

as  of  the  right  line  of  descent  from  Montaigne; 
there  is  in  him  then  all  that  unforced,  winsome, 
intimate,  yet  ever  restrained  revelation  of  self 
which  is  the  essayist's  model,  and  despair.  In  the 
love  letters  of  the  Brownings  may  be  found  some 
strictures  by  both  Eobert  and  Elizabeth  upon  an 
early  book  of  this  great  American's  which  must 
pain  the  admirer  of  the  Brownings  as  well  as  of 
Lowell.  It  displays  a  curious  insensitiveness  to 
just  this  power  of  the  Cambridge  man  which 
made  him  of  so  much  more  value  to  the  world 
than  if  he  had  been  scholar  and  nothing  more. 
One  can  hardly  rise  from  anything  like  a  complete 
examination  of  Lowell's  prose  without  the  regret 
that  his  fate  did  not  lead  him  to  cultivate  more 
assiduously  and  single-eyed,  this  rare  and  precious 
gift  for  essay — a  gift  shared  with  very  few  fellow 
Americans. 

A  glance  among  later  "Victorian  prose  writers 
must  convince  the  thoughtful  that  the  essay  in 
our  special  sense  is  gradually  written  less ;  that  as 
information  comes  in  at  the  door,  the  happy  giv- 
ing-forth  of  personality  flies  out  at  the  window. 
It  is  in  shy  men  like  Alexander  Smith  or  Eichard 
Jefferies  that  we  come  on  what  we  are  looking 
for,  in  such  as  they,  rather  than  the  more  noisily 
famed.  Plenty  of  charming  prosists  in  these  lat- 
ter days  have  been  deflected  by  utility  or  emolu- 
ment away  from  the  essay;  into  criticism,  like 
Lang  and  Gosse  and  Dobson  and  Pater;  into 
preaching  and  play-making,  like  Bernard  Shaw; 


THE   ESSAY   AS    MOOD    AND    FORM         97 

into  journalism  like  Barry  Pain  and  Quiller- 
Couch;  into  a  sort  of  forced  union  of  poetry  and 
fiction,  as  with  Richard  LeGallienne.  All  of  these, 
too,  and  others  still  have  been  touched  by  fiction 
for  better  or  worse. 

The  younger  Americans  with  potential  essay 
ability  are  also  for  the  most  part  swallowed  up  in 
more  practical,  '^useful"  ways  of  composition.  Her 
old-fashioned  devotion  to  the  elder  idea  of  the 
essay  makes  a  writer  like  Miss  Eepplier  stand  out 
with  a  good  deal  of  distinction,  so  few  of  her 
generation  are  willing  or  able  to  do  likewise. 
There  is  no  magazine  in  America  to-day,  with  the 
honorable  exception  of  "The  Atlantic,"  which  de- 
sires from  contributors  essays  that  look  back  to 
the  finer  tradition.  Mr.  Howells  has  reached  a 
position  of  such  authority  in  American  letters 
that  what  he  produces  in  the  essay  manner  is  wel- 
come— ^not  because  it  is  essay,  but  because  it  is  he. 
His  undeniable  gift  for  the  form  is  therefore  all 
the  better;  often  he  strikes  a  gait  happily  remind- 
ful of  what  the  essay  in  its  traditions  really  is; 
the  delightfully  frank  egoism  of  his  manner 
covering  genuine  simplicity  and  modesty  of  na- 
ture. Since  "Venetian  Days"  he  has  never  ceased 
to  be  an  essayist. 

The  twin  dangers  with  the  younger  essayists 
of  both  the  United  States  and  England  are  di- 
dacticism and  preciosity.  The  former  I  believe 
most  prevalent  in  this  country ;  and  it  is  of  course 
the  death  blow  of  the  true  essay.    The  danger  of 


98  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

being  too  precious  may  be  overcome  with  years: 
Max  Beerbohm,  for  example,  began  by  thinking 
and  talking  of  himself,  not  for  the  reader's  sake, 
but  for  self-love's  sake.  But  of  late  he  seems 
better  to  comprehend  the  essayist's  proper  sub- 
jectivity. We  should  not  despair  of  essayists :  no 
type  of  writer  is  rarer;  the  planets  must  conspire 
to  make  him ;  he  must  not  be  overwhelmed  by  life 
and  drawn  into  other  modes  of  expression. 

Our  generation  has  been  lucky  to  possess  one 
English  essayist  who  has  maintained  and  handed 
on  the  great  tradition.  I  mean  Stevenson.  Al- 
though, in  view  of  the  extent  and  vogue  of  his 
novels  and  tales,  Stevenson's  essay  work  may  seem 
almost  an  aside,  it  really  is  most  significant.  He 
is  in  the  line  of  Charles  Lamb.  Where  a  man 
like  Pater  writes  with  elegance  and  suggestion 
after  the  manner  of  the  suave  and  thoroughly 
equipped  critic,  Stevenson  does  a  vastly  higher 
thing;  he  talks  ruddily,  with  infinite  grace, 
humor,  pathos  and  happiness,  about  the  largest 
of  all  themes, — ^human  nature.  From  '^Ordered 
South"  to  "Pulvis  et  Umbra,"  through  many  a  gay 
mood  of  smile  and  sunshine  to  the  very  deeps  of 
life's  weltering  sea,  Stevenson  runs  the  gamut  of 
fancy  and  emotion,  the  fantasticality  of  his  themes 
being  in  itself  the  sign  manual  of  a  true  essayist. 
In  the  Letters  no  man  using  English  speech  has 
chatted  more  unreservedly,  and  with  more  es- 
sential charm ;  it  is  the  undress  of  literature  that 
always  instinctively  stops  this  side  of  etiquette. 


THE   E88AY   AS    MOOD   AND   FORM        99 

of  decency.  The  Stevenson  epistles  drive  ns  on  a 
still-hunt  outside  of  the  mother-tongue  for  their 
equal,  with  little  prospect  of  quarry  save  within 
French  borders. 

The  essay  is  thus  a  literary  creature  to  the  mak- 
ing of  which  go  mood  and  form — and  the  former 
would  seem  by  far  the  paramount  thing.  Great 
and  special  gifts  does  it  demand.  ^Tis  an  Ariel 
among  literary  kinds,  shy,  airy,  tricksy,  elusive, 
vanishing  in  the  garish  light  that  beats  down  upon 
the  arena  where  the  big  prizes  of  fiction  are  com- 
peted for  amidst  noise,  confusion  and  eclat.  But 
ever  in  its  own  slight,  winsome  way  does  it  compel 
attention  and  gain  hearts  for  its  very  own.  'Tis 
an  aristocrat  of  letters;  nowhere  is  it  so  hard  to 
hide  obvious  antecedents.  Many  try,  but  few 
triumph  in  it.  Therefore,  when  a  real  essayist 
arrives,  let  him  be  received  with  due  acclaim  and 
thanks  special,  since  through  him  is  handed  on 
so  ancient  and  honorable  a  form. 


THE  MODERN  NEED  FOR  LITERATURE  * 

In  the  childhood  of  nations  the  need  for  litera- 
ture was  the  need  for  knowledge.  Long  before 
literature  received  its  name  or  was  associated  with 
the  printed  page,  imaginative  utterance  in  epic, 
lyric,  play  or  Saga  had  its  utilitarian  value,  be- 
cause through  such  forms  history  was  handed 
down  and  popular  wisdom  embalmed.  The 
minstrel  chanted  of  battle  almost  before  the 
warriors  were  breathed,  their  sinews  relaxed;  un- 
written law,  which  is  traditional  custom,  was 
framed  in  gnomic  rhymes  for  the  better  remem- 
bering of  the  people;  early  ballads  spread  the 
amatory  news  of  the  countryside ;  later  broadsides 
bruited  the  burning  topics  of  the  day  in  towns. 

Even  the  Philistine  could  appreciate  literature 
which  conserved  these  practical  aims.  Few  men 
deny  the  necessity  of  information:  if  so-called 
poetry  can  convey  it,  they  are  willing  to  tolerate 
colorful  speech  and  the  lure  of  rhythmic  move- 
ment, however  insensitive  they  may  be  to  such 
charm.  Moreover,  it  is  only  fair  to  the  way-faring 
man,  now  or  in  the  dawn  of  time,  to  represent 
him  as  not  quite  indifferent  to  picture-making 
and  music  in  language.     Humanity  in  mass  en- 


*  An  address  for  the  Commencement  Exercises  at  the 
Rush  Medical  College  in  Chicago,  June  21st.  1901 
100 


MODERN   NEED   FOR   LITERATURE      101 

joys  a  figure  (though  not  recognizing  and  naming 
it  after  the  manner  of  the  rhetorics) ;  and  stands  at 
gaze  before  a  singer,  even  if  the  accompaniment 
be  on  a  barrel-organ.  It  may  well  be  believed  that 
in  the  elder  days  when  literature  was  thus  a 
vehicle  for  the  preservation  and  transmission  of 
knowledge,  many  folk  liked  literature  for  its  own 
sake.  But  letters  (as  we  now  call  them)  certainly 
had  a  solider  standing  on  change  aforetime  be- 
cause of  this  practical  use,  this  close  kinship  with 
information. 

With  the  development  of  society,  however,  has 
come  a  change.  As  civilization  became  articulate  ^^ 
and  complex,  literature  slowly,  surely  differenti- 
ated itself  from  the  practical  and  utilitarian :  and 
knowledge — science,  to  give  it  a  familiar  and 
restrictive  name — stood  forth  clearly  over  against 
the  imaginative  expression  of  life,  whether  in 
art  or  letters.  And  when  this  happened,  the 
Philistine  no  longer  needed  literature,  nor  liked 
it.  He  had  an  instinctive  feeling  that  it  was  sham, 
make-believe,  a  lying  about  life  or  a  prettifying 
of  life  for  the  amusement  of  the  idle  rich.  This 
view  is  of  course  of  the  Boeotian  variety  of 
thought;  yet  common  enough  of  old,  nor  alto- 
gether departed  this  world  even  now.  But  as  men 
waxed  in  civilization,  in  culture,  they  came  gradu- 
ally to  see  that  literature  in  any  worthy  sense  was 
something  higher ;  that  it  could  even  be  of  better 
use  than  for  the  transmission  of  information  or 
the  killing  of  time;   that  it  embraced  within  its 


102  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

spacious  domain  all  such  records  and  accounts  of 
human  beings  and  their  actions  as  should  give  us 
a  sense  of  the  power,  beauty,  grandeur  and  terror 
of  life  so  that  its  true  significance  might  be 
grasped.  Literature  in  the  enlightened  modern 
view  is  an  interpretation  of  life  both  as  fact  and 
as  symbol ;  not  only  in  terms  of  number  and  space 
and  time-sequence,  but  in  terms  of  heart  and  soul 
as  well — ^in  terms  of  living. 

If  this  be  true,  we  need  not  hold  back  from  de- 
claring that  literature  is  one  of  the  world's  great 
mouthpieces  for  the  expression  of  ideals.  To  say 
this  is  not  to  ignore  the  pleasure-giving  province 
of  letters;  the  pleasure  being,  nevertheless,  a 
means  to  an  end  rather  than  the  end  itself;  just 
as  Emerson  shows  how  love  between  the  young 
man  and  maiden,  that  divine  prologue  to  the 
human  drama  which  seems  the  play  itself,  is  in 
reality  but  a  step  to  lead  those  dear  young 
creatures  on  to  a  final  comprehension  of  the 
spiritual  love  in  the  universe — or,  as  the  theo- 
logian would  put  it,  to  a  knowledge  of  God. 
There  is  nothing,  I  say,  in  this  conception  of  liter- 
ature hostile  to  the  idea  of  amusement,  pleasure, 
that  inheres  in  it.  Indeed  that  is  literature's  way 
of  doing  good;  and  the  degree  of  joy  that  is  got 
out  of  a  book  is  a  measure  of  its  fruitfulness  for 
us.  Too  often  the  province  of  instruction  and 
the  province  of  pleasure  in  literature  are  con- 
trasted as  if  they  were  antithetical,  which  is  the 
veriest  nonsense.    Instruction  in  the  noblest  sense 


MODERN   NEED   FOR   LITERATURE      103 

can  come  only  where  there  is  antecedent  pleasure. 
Witness  the  school-child  beginning  to  stir  within 
and  to  grow,  simply  because  he  or  she  suddenly, 
unexpectedly,  finds  a  lesson  interesting — ^because 
it  seems  in  some  way  related  to  life  as  the  boy 
or  girl  knows  life ;  or  as  it  has  been  warmed  by  the 
magnetism  of  a  real  teacher — ^not  a  text-book  with 
arms  and  legs. 

Literature  and  religion,  along  with  the  arts, 
are  the  chief  sources  for  the  supplying  of  ideals. 
And  whereas  religion  has  an  immense  advantage  in 
authority  and  gravity  of  aim,  it  is  hardly  too  much 
to  say  for  literature  that  in  its  secularity  as  well 
as  in  its  plastic  power  to  embrace  the  human  case 
in  all  conceivable  varieties,  there  lies  a  certain 
leverage ;  while  in  the  fact  that  literature  teaches 
not  didactically  but  by  the  winsome  indirection 
of  art,  there  is  an  obvious  added  strength, — ^the 
soul  of  mankind  being  caught  unawares,  as  it 
were,  through  sensitiveness  to  beauty,  by  the 
spirit  of  good  which  is  in  literature — and  in  life. 
Matthew  Arnold,  you  will  remember,  went  so  far 
as  to  assert  his  belief  that  all  that  should  be  re- 
tained of  the  religion  of  the  future  would  be  its 
essential  poetry,  the  husks  of  form,  the  shards  of 
dogma,  being  dropped  behind.  In  other  words,  he 
thought  that  literature  would  swallow  up  religion. 
Without  acting  upon  so  radical  a  prophecy,  surely 
we  may  feel  that  great  literature  in  its  enlighten- 
ment and  uplift  is  always  a  handmaid  of  true  re- 
ligion, trying  to  do  much  the  same  for  man  in  a 


104  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

somewhat  different  way;  approaching  the  one 
Temple  by  another  avenue,  the  avenue  of  Beauty 
instead  of  by  the  avenue  of  the  Good,  both  meet- 
ing in  the  avenue  of  the  True,  which  runs  straight 
on  and  into  the  Holy  of  Holies — for  the  Temple 
is  one. 

Every  age,  then,  needs  its  ideals,  since  they  are 
magnets  pointing  the  polar  paths  of  conduct,  of 
righteousness ;  touchstones  of  character ;  lamps  to 
the  feet  of  those  who  would  walk  upon  the  moun- 
tains. And  literature,  defined  with  any  adequacy, 
can  do  a  vast  deal  to  create  and  hand  on  these 
ideals.  In  this  sense,  mankind's  need  for  litera- 
ture is  permanent. 

Perhaps  some  one  thinks  I  do  not  allow  suffi- 
ciently for  the  lower  grades  of  what  is  called 
literature.  We  cannot  always  be  on  the  heights. 
Moreover, 

*'Not  always  the  air  that  is  rarest 

Is  fairest. 
And  we  long  in  the  valley  to  follow 
Apollo," 

complains  the  poet.  There  is  neutral  ground 
where  books  furnish  us  pleasure  or  pastime  but 
fail  of  the  great  things  here  claimed  for  them. 
Granted.  There  are  foot-hills  and  intermediate 
slopes  as  well  as  shining  peaks;  in  fact,  the 
humbler  altitudes  are  the  condition  of  having 
mountains  at  all.  Yet,  when  we  say  mountains, 
we  mean,  rightly  enough,  the  aerial  summits, 
the  aeries  of  eagles,  topped  by  virginal  snows. 


MODERN   NEED   FOR   LITERATURE      105 

seeming  inaccessible  to  common  mortals.  And 
likewise,  when  we  speak  of  literature  and  would 
discover  its  true  physiognomy,  we  very  properly 
emphasize  the  lofty  creations  which  are  to  be  seen 
from  afar  and  lift  themselves  nearest  to  God. 

But  our  day,  it  seems  to  me,  has  a  special  need 
for  the  inspiration  from  literature — from  great 
essay,  fiction,  drama  and  poetry — and  for  particu- 
lar reasons.  Ours  is  a  complex  and  cosmopolitan 
time ;  hence,  literature  can  do  not  one  but  a  num- 
ber of  services  for  it,  corresponding  to  the 
symptomatic  phases  of  the  age.  The  present  era 
is  called  carelessly  this  or  that:  material,  on  the 
hunt  for  Yankee  inventions;  commercial,  on  the 
hunt  for  the  dollar;  scientific,  on  the  hunt  for 
the  fact;  spiritual,  on  the  hunt  for  psychic 
phenomena  and  for  strange  new  gods;  agnostic, 
rejoicing  in  the  cry,  "There  is  no  God  and  August 
Compte  is  His  Prophet;^'  decadent,  out-heroding 
Herod  in  obscene  rites;  humanitarian,  seeking  to 
play  the  part  of  the  good  Samaritan  as  never  be- 
fore. The  truth  is  we  are  none  of  these  exclu- 
sively, but  all  of  them,  and  more  too.  It  takes  a 
wide  vision  to  cover  such  a  time  as  this;  it  is  a 
narrow,  anemic  view  which  interprets  'the 
Zeitgeist  as  if  it  were  a  one-theory  movement.  Let 
us  have  a  look  at  a  few  of  these  streams  of 
tendency,  to  see  how  they  offer  literature  her  op- 
portunity. 

We  are  scientific,  I  say.  We  study  objective 
phenomena  as  they  have  never  been  studied  before. 


106  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

How  august  the  revealments  of  the  nineteenth 
century  in  this  vast  field  of  research !  To  read  a 
book  like  Wallace's  ''The  Wonderful  Century/'  or 
John  Fiske's  ''A  Century  of  Science"  is  as  stimu- 
lating to  the  imagination  as  an  Arabian  Nights 
Entertainment.  You,  gentlemen  of  the  graduating 
class,  find  it  your  privilege  to  enter  on  this  noble 
quest  of  facts  which  shall  effect  the  alleviation  of 
Buffering  mankind  and  bring  earth  nearer  to 
heaven, — ^yea,  which  in  the  far  reaches  of  time 
may,  it  would  almost  seem  to  the  quickened  fancy, 
solve  the  riddle  of  immortality  by  the  prolonga- 
tion of  human  life,  approximating  ever  to  the 
limitless  life  of  the  Better  Land.  You  are  the 
prophets  of  Euthanasia,  the  bringers-in  of  hope. 
But  this  privilege  of  yours,  this  tireless  hunt  for 
cause  and  effect  within  the  sphere  of  the  psycho- 
physical, is  also  your  penalty,  or  may  be.  From 
very  devotion  to  the  fact,  the  spirit  may  be  neg- 
lected; and  a  sort  of  atrophy  of  the  nature  result 
towards  the  things  of  the  heart  and  imagination. 
This  is  not  inevitable,  of  course;  but  it  is  a  pos- 
sible danger,  especially  to  the  scientist,  pure  and 
simple,  who  lacks  the  magnificent  corrective  which 
the  good  physician  has  in  his  daily  practical 
ministrations  to  woful  men  and  women.  You  re- 
member Darwin's  testimony:  how,  loving  Shaks- 
pere  and  the  major  poets  and  fictionists,  but 
obliged  to  turn  his  back  upon  literature  for  years 
because  of  stress  of  work,  he  found,  to  his 
astonishment,    upon    returning    to    those    once- 


MODERN   NEED   FOR   LITERATURE       107 

cherished  friends,  that  a  distaste  for  them  had 
grown  Tip  in  him — a  remarkable  example  of  the 
shrinking  of  a  faculty  through  disuse.  The 
scientific  man,  as  perhaps  no  other,  needs  litera- 
ture; not  only  as  a  legitimate  amusement,  a  form 
of  recreation — and  we  forget  at  times  when  we 
despitefully  regard  recreation  that  it  means  re- 
creation— ^but  also  as  an  exercise  of  the  soul,  a 
stimulator  of  the  emotive,  intuitional,  affectional 
and  aspirational  fibres  of  a  person. 

The  patronizing,  half-contemptuous  attitude  of 
the  so-called  practical  person  towards  literature  is 
sometimes  a  little  hard  to  bear.  A  novel  is  to  him 
something  to  let  down  on  after  dinner,  along  with 
the  post-prandial  cigar,  turning  away  from  real 
and  important  matters.  People  drop  into  poetry, 
as  did  Silas  Wegg  of  blessed  memory — ^'tis  a  weak- 
ness at  the  best.  The  drama  affords  horse-play, 
slang,  the  ballet  and  dubious  situations,  to  jaded 
nerves  and  drooping  spirits.-  There  is  in  a 
single-eyed  devotion  to  objective  fact,  to  the 
realities  of  the  senses,  at  least  a  possibility  that  an 
absurd  under- valuation  of  literature  may  follow; 
its  true  dignity  and  significance  being  utterly  lost 
sight  of  in  such  a  topsy-turvy  notion  of  the  re- 
lations of  things  in  life  that  the  first  may  be  last 
and  soul  be  as  nothing  to  flesh.  Literature  in  the 
high  sense  is  a  wholesome  antidote  for  that  par- 
ticular form  of  Philistinism  which  harps  tire- 
somely  upon  what  is  known  as  the  practical, — 
utility  and  the  like,  meaning  that  which  can  be 


108  F0RGE8   IN  FICTION 

felt,  touched,  tasted  and  seen.  To  the  philosopher, 
all  is  practical  which  advances  the  race,  and  that 
most  practical  which  most  helps  the  highest  in 
man ;  and  all  is  useful  which  best  considers  man's 
highest  uses.  This  wretchedly  limited,  purblind, 
market-place  conception  of  life  cannot  be  held  by 
one  who  enters  sjrtnpathetically  into  the  privileges 
of  literature.  And,  when  fact  in  this  special  and 
narrow  sense  is  emphasized  (as  it  is  in  our  new 
century),  it  is  a  blessed  thing  that  a  door  still 
stands  invitingly  open  upon  a  garden  of  de- 
lights, upon  the  pleasances  of  the  imagination, 
fairer,  richer  than  ever  before,  so  notable  have 
been  the  additions  to  the  garden-growths  during 
the  past  one  hundred  years — ^that  wonderful 
nineteenth  century  literature,  fruit  of  so  many 
lands  and  kinds. 

Again,  ours  is  a  day  when  the  dollar  is  believed 
to  be  mighty,  if  not  almighty !  the  multi-million- 
aire is  a  type  of  manhood  emblazoned  in  news- 
paper and  magazine,  all  but  worshiped  at  the 
family  altar.  By  no  means  is  the  American  unique 
here;  but  viewing  modern  life  broadly,  is  it  not 
true  that  there  is  an  increasing  tendency  to  grade 
people  by  their  bank-account,  to  give  a  new  mean- 
ing to  the  word  idolatry?  Now,  literature,  when 
true  to  its  mission,  reflects  and  interprets  life 
(its  raw  material)  in  such  wise  that  no  such  dis- 
proportionate estimate  of  money  is  possible; 
simply  because  in  a  broad,  sane  outlook  on  life, 
money  is  shown  to  be  but  a  means  to  an  end, — 


MODERN  NEED   FOR   LITERATURE      109 

and  that  end  the  realization  in  each  and  all  of  us 
of  our  potentialities,  so  that  a  happier,  richer  and 
higher  life  shall  ensue  and  society  at  large  he 
permanently  benefited.  The  voice  of  all  literature 
is  consentient  in  thus  acclaiming  the  real  mean- 
ing of  life;  to  wit,  character-formation,  growth 
towards  the  ideal  for  ourselves  and  others.  Its 
teaching  is  all  that  way, — ^just  as  truly  when  it 
exhibits  vice,  degradation  and  despair  as  when 
sailing  majestically  upon  the  winds  of  heaven 
high  above  human  frailty.  For  in  sounding  the 
dissonance,  literature  makes  us  to  yearn  for  the 
celestial  harmonies;  we  would  not  recognize  the 
discordant  as  such,  in  sooth,  were  it  not  for  our 
instinct  for  the  great  concords  beneath  the  sur- 
face jars.  Literature  is  all  the  while  telling  us 
of  life  so  that  we  read  plain  its  obscure  scroll, 
understand  its  true  values,  and  so  are  safeguarded 
from  the  terribly  shriveling  idea  of  existence  pos- 
sible to  the  mere  money  grabber.  After  all,  there 
is  something  in  the  world,  as  Stevenson  has  it, 
besides  "mud  and  old  iron,  cheap  desires  and 
cheap  fears."  George  Eliot  draws  a  Silas  Marner, 
and  we  see  that  hideous  thing  a  miser  weaned  from 
gold  coin  by  the  softer,  tenderer  gold  of  a  lovely 
little  maiden's  hair.  Moliere  paints  a  Harpagon, 
and  we  shudder  away  from  the  possibility  of  that 
same  soulless  passion.  Dickens  puts  before  us  in 
full  length  the  elder  Dombey  that  we  may  behold 
the  final  melting  of  that  man  of  marble  to  whom 
business  was  a  God,  he  being  led  by  the  potent 


110  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

hand  of  his  girl-ehild  back  to  the  real  life  he  had 
so  forgotten — the  life  of  the  simple  affections  and 
of  household  hearts.  And  Balzac's  Grandet  bites 
into  our  memory  forever  the  awful  consequences 
of  that  insatiable  money-lust,  with  its  demoniac 
power  of  warping  man's  nobler  nature.  Literature 
of  the  first  order  is  always  doing  just  this,  I  re- 
peat ;  passing  a  healing  hand  across  the  eyes  sealed 
by  worldliness  and  making  them  to  see,  not 
through  a  glass  darkly,  but  face  to  face.  The  need 
for  literature  is  doubled  whenever  and  wherever 
men  and  women  are  in  bondage  to  these  eidola  of 
the  world,  the  flesh  and  the  devil. 

But  we  are  practical  in  the  United  States  and 
need  literature,  again,  because  we  incline  to  laud 
use  rather  than  beauty — as  if  beauty  were  aught 
but  a  higher  usefulness.  We  are  a  practical  folk, 
it  is  said — ^which  is  on  the  whole  a  misleading 
generalization.  Still,  it  is  not  to  be  denied  that 
we  are  only  of  late  beginning  to  turn  from  a 
strenuous  attention  to  material  and  immediate  in- 
terests, giving  heed  to  higher  interests.  The 
Prince  of  Peace  and  Prosperity  is  the  proper  per- 
son to  arouse  the  Sleeping  Beauty  from  her  slum- 
ber. There  is  here  no  matter  for  reproach;  our 
problems  during  the  century  of  the  Eepublic  have 
been  practical;  problems  of  Government,  Na- 
tional, State  and  Municipal;  problems  economic 
and  political.  Arts  and  letters  must  of  necessity 
wait  on  such  work;  the  wonder  is  (in  view  of  the 
situation)    that    Americans  can    point  to    such 


MODERN  NEED  FOR   LITERATURE      111 

writers  as  distinguish  and  adorn  the  century  just 
closed. 

Our  literary  art,  our  architecture,  public  and 
private,  our  endeavors  in  music  and  painting, 
have  all  testified  in  the  past  to  this  necessary  de- 
votion to  practical  pursuits  and  services.  But 
worthy  accomplishment  in  these  high  activities  is 
now  common.  The  Exposition  year  of  1893  was  a 
signal  that  we  had  in  many  ways  stepped  from 
our  leading  strings;  and  more  and  more  with  the 
growth  of  a  leisured  class  shall  we  realize  that 
immunity  from  wage-earning  does  not  inevitably 
mean  dissipation  nor  exclusive  devotion  to  sports 
and  society.  While,  with  the  establishment  of  a 
firm  material  basis  for  the  cultivation  of  the 
higher  faculties,  literature,  along  with  the  other 
arts,  should  make  its  appeal  to  a  constantly  grow- 
ing audience.  And  I  believe  it  is  doing  so,  the 
popular  magazine,  unjustly  sneered  at  by  some, 
being  a  sort  of  middle  member  in  a  chain  which 
begins  with  the  newspaper  and  ends  with  standard 
literature.  If,  along  with  steadily  waxing  ma- 
terial prosperity,  there  come  not  a  corresponding 
response  to  such  an  art  and  revealer  of  life  as 
literature,  sorry  will  be  our  case  indeed.  That  way 
decadence  lies.  A  cultivation  of  the  sense  of 
beauty  and  the  sense  of  righteousness  (which  are 
not  twain,  but  one,  the  holiness  of  beauty,  in 
Lanier's  phrase,  being  as  precious  as  the  beauty  of 
holiness)  must  go  with  general  prosperity;  other- 


112  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

wise,  that  land  is  doomed.  All  history  is  a  sole 
trumpet-voice  announcing  these  tidings. 

The  commonest  mistake  about  literature  is  the 
notion  that  it  is  merely  an  ornament  to  life.  The 
reason  that  a  nation  in  the  more  practical  period 
of  its  development  has  less  to  do  with  the  arts  is 
not  because  the  time  for  luxury  has  not  come ;  but 
because  it  is  in  a  lower  stage  of  evolution,  and 
not  altogether  ready  for  the  finer  things,  for  a 
philosophic  conception  of  the  universe.  Our  best 
American  literature,  that  made  by  the  prophet 
sages  and  singers  of  New  England,  was  produced 
under  conditions  giving  the  lie  direct  to  the  idea 
that  only  an  environment  of  luxury  begets 
creative  works.  The  high  thinking  of  an  Emer- 
son comes  out  of  plain  living. 

But  again,  we  need  literature  to  idealize  the 
conventional,  the  commonplace  and  the  homely  in 
life.  I  do  not  mean  by  idealize  to  falsify  or  senti- 
mentalize; but  to  show  the  idea  inhering  in  the 
gross  and  seemingly  meaningless  mass,  to  detach 
the  symbol  from  the  fact,  so  that  the  fact  takes 
on  significance  and  loveliness.  Eealism  of  the 
right  sort  should  serve  as  a  sort  of  gloss  on  the 
poet's  text, 

"Flesh  is  as  nothing  to  Spirit, 
And  the  essence  of  life  is  divine." 

It  should  make  apparent  that  as  there  is  nothing 
harder  so  there  is  nothing  higher  than  the  daily 
doing  of  little  duties ;  as  Wordsworth  calls  them, 

"The  little  nameless  unrememhered  acts 
Of  kindness  and  of  love." 


MODERN   NEED   FOR   LITERATURE       113 

It  should  show  that  war,  which  often  seems  but 
a  huddle  of  carnage,  a  blaze  of  savage  passions.  Is 
at  least  linked  with  the  love  of  country,  with  the 
thought  that  "sweet  and  glorious  it  is  to  die  for 
one's  land ;"  that  religion  is  something  more  than 
an  observance  of  forms,  being  the  merging  of  all 
lesser  loves  in  the  love  of  the  Eternal  Maker  and 
Father;  that  even  machinery  has  poetry  in  it,  as 
Kipling's  McAndrews  has  demonstrated.  It  is 
thus  that  literature  should  make  a  glory  out  of 
the  grey  substance  of  our  days.  This  handling 
of  the  homely  so  that  it  is  seen  to  have  a  touch  of 
the  heavenly,  is  the  mission  of  your  true  realist. 
The  great  makers  of  literature  are  always  in  this 
sense  realists  as  much  as  idealists.  It  is  the  way 
of  Homer,  of  Dante,  of  Shakspere,  of  Cervantes; 
of  Moliere,  Goethe,  Tolstoy,  Meredith  and  Steven- 
son. Let  me  give  an  example  from  Master  Wil- 
liam Shakspere — ^master  alike  of  human  speech 
and  human  life;  that  inimitable  scene  in  "Henry 
V,"  where  from  the  mouths  of  his  boon  compan- 
ions, Dame  Quickly,  Pistol,  ^"3^01,  and  Bardolph, 
we  learn  of  the  passing  of  Falstaff . 

Sir  John's  death  being  announced  by  Ancient 
Pistol,  says  Bardolph,  eyes  ashine  for  the  nonce 
as  well  as  nose: 

^^ould  I  were  with  him,  wheresoever  he  is, 
either  in  heaven  or  hell."  What  a  world  of  good 
fellowship  in  that  line!  And  then  mine  hostess 
goes  on,  with  exquisite  pathos,  all  unconscious 
and  homely  as  it  is : 


114  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

^^Nay,  sure,  he's  not  in  hell;  he's  in  Arthur's 
bosom,  if  ever  man  went  to  Arthur's  bosom."  She 
meant  Abraham's  bosom — ^but  we  are  glad  of  the 
slip,  for  emotion  is  always  making  slips  of  that 
kind.  "A'  made  a  finer  end  and  went  away  as 
it  had  been  any  Christom  child;  a'  parted  even 
just  between  twelve  and  one,  even  at  the  turning 
o'  the  tide."  You  remember  that  Barkis,  too,  went 
out  with  the  tide  in  another  great  homely-life 
scene:  ^Tor  after  I  saw  him  fumble  with  the 
sheets  and  play  with  flowers  and  smile  upon  his 
fingers'  ends,  I  knew  there  was  but  one  way,"  (you 
can  hear  the  good  dame  snuffle  by  this  time  as  she 
continues)  ^^for  his  nose  was  as  sharp  as  a  pen 
and  a'  babbled  of  green  fields."  That  sorry  old 
worldling,  Falstaff,  that  fellow  of  sack  and  women, 
thievery  and  braggadocio,  being  Christian  reared, 
does  when  he  comes  to  the  mind-wandering 
which  preludes  death,  revert  to  that  most  idyllic- 
ally  beautiful  of  psalms  and  is  led  beside  still 
waters,  yea,  lies  down  in  green  pastures,  as  if  he 
were  a  care-free  boy  again  untouched  of  sin.  Per- 
haps even  he  can  say,  "I  will  fear  no  evil,  for  thou 
art  with  me."  But  hear  Dame  Quickly  again: 

^^ow  now,  Sir  John !  quoth  I ;  what  man,  be 
o'  good  cheer.  So  a'  cried  out,  God,  God,  God! 
three  or  four  times.  !N'ow  I,  to  comfort  him,  bid 
him  a'  should  not  think  of  God ;  I  hoped  there  was 
no  need  to  trouble  himself  with  any  such  thoughts 
yet.  So  a'  bade  me  lay  more  clothes  on  his  feet; 
I  put  my  hand  into  the  bed  and  felt  them,  and 


MODERN   NEED  FOR   LITERATURE      115 

they  were  as  cold  as  any  stone;  then  I  felt  to  the 
knees,  and  they  were  as  cold  as  any  stone;  and  so 
upward  and  upward,  and  all  was  as  cold  as  any 
stone." 

How  circumstantial  it  all  is,  like  a  doctor's  re- 
port for  detail  and  accuracy ;  but  how  it  is  illumi- 
nated with  a  splendidly  fraternal  tolerancy  to- 
wards all  seamy  humanity,  living  and  dead.  Of 
a  sudden  we  realize  that  even  the  great  confra- 
ternity of  rogues — epitomized  in  this  master-rogue 
of  all  literature — ^is  united  to  us  in  a  common 
bond  of  brotherhood;  and  that  is  a  lesson  worth 
while.  Behold,  I  say  again,  the  true  and  only 
realism.  Is  it  too  much  to  claim  for  literature 
that  she  has  no  mean  mission  in  thus  revealing  a 
spirit  of  good  in  things  counted  evil,  in  suggest- 
ing that  nothing  is  common  and  unclean  past  re- 
demption ?  Such  at  least  is  the  divine  unwisdom 
of  the  pure  in  heart. 

And  now  a  message  of  literature  for  our  time 
which  I  would  especially  bear  down  on  is  its  power 
to  help  the  agnostic  mood.  Never  before,  I  must 
think,  has  a  more  gracious  or  a  grander  oppor- 
tunity offered  itself  to  literature  than  in  this  re- 
gard. Our  generation  has  experienced  a  tremen- 
dous readjustment  of  ethical  ideas,  a  veritable 
seismic  upheaval,  of  which  the  tremors  and  rum- 
blings have  scarcely  died  away.  The  agnostic 
state  of  mind  has  been  the  natural  outcome  of  all 
this  change — which  in  the  end  will  be  seen  to 
stand  for  gain  more  than  loss.    Now  the  essence 


116  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

of  great  literature,  like  that  of  true  religion,  is  of 
a  potency  to  furnish  the  doubting  Thomases  with 
sweetness  and  light;  with  hope,  inspiration  and  a 
golden  comfort:  and  it  can  do  this  with  all  the 
winning  gentleness  of  love  and  with  that  strength 
of  purity  which  is  as  the  strength  of  ten.  Agnosti- 
cism is  a  brain  state ;  literature  appeals  primarily 
to  the  heart  and  is  the  antidote  needed,  offering 
its  warm-blooded,  wholesome,  imperative  yea  to 
the  cold  analytic  nay  of  the  intellect.  A  very  im- 
portant function  of  literature  in  respect  of  modern 
life  lies  here. 

You  are  very  well  aware,  however,  that  much 
of  current  literature,  so  far  from  counteracting 
this  tendency  to  doubt  and  despair,  abets  it,  and, 
in  fact,  issues  out  of  it.  This  is  to  be  expected, 
for  literature  (when  honest)  should  always  faith- 
fully reflect  the  spirit  of  the  Time;  it  is  its  duty 
its  privilege.  Nor  must  we  deny  the  benefit  of 
literature  which  not  only  mirrors  the  compara- 
tively smooth  surface  waters  of  society  but  also 
drops  a  plummet  line  into  its  murky  abysmal 
depths.  The  knife  of  the  surgeon  seeking  to  ex- 
tirpate the  root  trouble  is  kindly  meant  and  wel- 
come. 

Particularly  is  the  literature  which  reveals  the 
predicaments  of  the  weak,  the  wretched,  the  out- 
cast of  the  earth,  a  serviceable  addition  to  the 
library  table.  There  is  a  need  of  books  that 
awaken  our  sympathies  for  the  under  dog  in  the 
social  struggle,  and  make  us  to  understand  his 


MODERN   NEED   FOR   LITERATURE       117 

situation.  The  under  dog  will  be  dustier  and  per- 
haps bloodier  than  his  conqueror  and  so  is  likely 
to  be  less  pleasant  to  look  upon ;  but  it  were  a  sad 
mistake  not  to  pay  attention  to  him.  Never  has 
there  been  so  much  fiction  and  drama  and  poetry 
that  has  expressed  the 

"StiU  sad  music  of  humanity," 

and  one  deadens  one's  sensibilities  and  makes  shal- 
low one's  nature  in  turning  away  from  such  books 
simply  because  they  are  not  agreeable.  This  spirit 
extends  even  to  animals.  Nevertheless,  I  think  we 
can  say,  and  say  with  emphasis,  that  in  considera- 
tion of  the  liberal  doses  of  pessimism  furnished 
for  the  past  decade  in  the  literature  of  civilized 
lands,  in  view  of  the  fact  (already  adumbrated) 
that  a  more  cheerful  view  of  the  world  is  becoming 
popular,  and  with  the  additional  consideration 
that  helpfulness  and  good  cheer  are  prime  merits 
always  in  literary  creations,  we  can  say,  I  repeat, 
that  the  paramount  need  just  now  is  for  books 
that  incite  to  courageous  action,  to  high  heart 
and  hope,  to  such  a  broad  re-statement  of  the  ever- 
lasting beautiful  as  shall  make  for  happy  living, 
for  vigorous  deeds,  for  an  outdoor  optimism. 

Of  desiccated  analytics,  of  dark  psychic  tortuosi- 
ties, of  eloquent  variations  on  the  overworked 
theme,  vanitas  vanitatum,  we  have  had  enough 
and  to  spare.  The  gospel  for  an  age  of  doubt  (to 
borrow  Dr.  Van  Dyke's  name  for  it)  should  be  of 
gladder  tidings.  Modern  literature  must  be  thera- 
peutic; it  must  carry  healing  in  its  wings.     It 


118  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

must  not  be  a  literature  for  and  by  mattoids.  Nor 
is  this  to  slight  the  work  of  writers  like  Tolstoy, 
Zola,  Hardy,  and  Ibsen;  we  need  them,  too — and 
have  had  them.  But  in  the  light  of  the  tendency 
for  the  past  twenty  years,  and  looking  to  the  fu- 
ture, we  need  the  literature  of  encouragement 
more.  How  are  we  going  to  get  it  ?  It  lies  with 
the  thoughtful  reading  public;  it  can  be  effected 
if  that  body  of  folk  will  show  plainly  in  what  they 
buy,  what  sort  of  literature  they  prefer.  The  test 
of  sales  is  obvious  and  irresistible  in  its  results. 
If  the  great  majority  of  those  who  support  litera- 
ture wish  for  the  literature  of  encouragement 
rather  than  for  the  literature  of  despair,  and  will 
leave  the  one  and  cleave  unto  the  other,  the  bat- 
tle is  won.  It  is  a  pity  we  cannot  consciously 
combine  on  this.  Ours  is  an  age  of  Trusts.  I 
should  like  to  see  a  Tiust  of  the  Amalgamated 
Interests  of  Consumers  of  the  Literature  of  Ozone 
and  Sunlight,  Unlimited.  The  title  is  rather  cum- 
bersome ;  but  what  a  power-house  that  plant  could 
command. 

In  a  word,  and  finally,  literature  is  always 
needed  to  be  a  spokesman  of  those  deep-lying, 
ever  abiding  instincts  and  affirmations  of  the  soul 
of  man  which  dominate  his  life  and  shape  his  end. 
And  literature  is  of  particular  use  to-day  just  in 
proportion  as  we  forget  that  life  is  more  in  the 
spirit  than  in  the  flesh;  that  in  order  to  any  full 
living,  we  must  feed  not  the  body  only  but  the 
mind  and  soul  as  well. 


PAST  AND  PRESENT  IN  LITERATURE 

The  Bishop  of  London  is  credited  with  advising 
some  young  women  students  to  read  three  books 
written  before  the  year  1800  for  every  one  written 
later.  He  declared  that,  in  accordance  with  a  vow, 
he  had  followed  this  plan  for  ten  years  and  that 
those  years  had  been  the  happiest  of  his  life. 

I  hope  his  lordship  said  nothing  of  the  sort; 
if  he  did,  one  is  inclined  to  feel  the  more  sympa- 
thetic toward  Sydney  Smith's  remark — ^that  fam- 
ous wit  had  in  mind  the  exceeding  difficulty  of 
turning  the  classic  of  a  literature  into  the  tongue 
of  another — ^that  everything  suffers  by  translation 
— except  a  bishop. 

For  the  imputed  statement  is  foolish  and  mis- 
leading. It  is  an  example  of  an  often  recurrent 
attitude  toward  the  past  and  the  present,  the  dei- 
fication of  the  one  and  the  depreciation  of  the 
other,  so  that  great  injustice  is  done  to  modern 
things.  Deep  in  the  human  heart  is  implanted 
the  yearning  back  toward  a  Golden  Age,  forward, 
to  the  Millennium ;  and  the  poor  tarnished  present 
pays  the  penalty  of  its  humdrum  nearness,  its 
unideal  reality.  It  would  be  much  closer  to  the 
truth  to  say  that  three  books  to  one  in  favor  of 
the  nineteenth  century  were  advisable,  especially 
119 


120  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

if  the  literature  of  the  English-speaking  race  be 
in  mind;  and  the  bishop's  words,  as  reported, 
would  seem  to  have  meant  that.  Think  for  a 
moment  what  such  a  dictum  implies !  It  belittles, 
or  at  least  throws  out  of  proportion,  the  poetry 
of  Keats,  Shelley  and  Byron,  of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge,  of  Browning,  Tennyson  and  Swinburne, 
of  Poe,  Whitman  and  Kipling,  the  romances  and 
novels  of  Scott,  Hawthorne  and  Stevenson,  of 
Eliot,  Dickens  and  Thackeray,  of  later  men  and 
women  like  Meredith,  Hardy,  Ward  and  Barrie; 
it  slights  the  essay  work  of  Lamb,  Hunt,  Hazlitt, 
De  Quincey  and  Irving,  of  Carlyle  and  Euskin,  of 
Emerson  and  Lowell.  These  and  many  others 
scarcely  less  worthy  are  set  aside,  by  implication, 
as  if  in  writing  later  than  that  arbitrary  mark  of 
1800  they  had  committed  the  unpardonable  sin. 
I  am  running  over,  be  it  observed,  but  a  few  stel- 
lar names,  and  am  confined  to  authors  using  our 
own  tongue.  If  continental  literature  were  to  be 
included,  the  bishop's  offense  becomes  more  hein- 
ous, for  one's  head  fairly  buzzes  with  the  great 
creative  writers  whose  labor  has  since  been  done. 
In  short,  taking  the  range,  variety  and  quality 
of  performance  and  the  number  of  representatives 
into  the  consideration,  the  simple  fact  is  that  no 
century  in  the  whole  evolution  of  our  magnificent 
English  literature  is  so  rich  and  worthy  of  laud 
as  the  one  just  closed,  not  even  Shakspere's,  on 
the  principle  that  one  swallow  does  not  make  a 
summer.    It  is  the  part  of  common-sense,  justice 


PAST  AND  PRESENT  IN  LITERATURE    121 

and  patriotism  to  say  this;  the  danger  in  twisting 
the  truth  into  an  undue  exaltation  of  the  by-gone 
— ^fine  as  that  may  be — ^is  the  neglect  of  the  pres- 
ent-day literature  by  those  who  are  likely  to  be  led 
by  what  to  them  seems  a  final  judgment,  to  wit, 
the  opinion  of  a  bishop. 

There  is  a  special  reason  why  the  present  in 
literature  should  be  appreciated  at  its  full  worth. 
The  very  fact  that  it  is  the  present,  not  the  past, 
is  in  its  favor.  Even  if  nineteenth  century  litera- 
ture were  distinctly  inferior  to  the  eighteenth,  in- 
stead of  being  triumphantly  greater,  it  would  be 
ill-advised  to  undervalue  the  former ;  nay,  it  would 
still  have  an  interest  for  us  beyond  that  of  any 
other  time.  And  this,  simply  because  it  represents 
our  day.  Literature  always  reflects  life,  and  the 
best  literature  of  a  given  age  is  a  mirror  in  which 
we  may  see  move  the  body  of  the  age,  and,  listen- 
ing, catch  the  sound  of  its  heart-beats.  Its  lan- 
guage is  our  own;  it  expresses  our  ideals,  indus- 
trial, social,  political,  philosophical,  spiritual;  it 
involves  a  hundred  questions  pertinent  to  our  own 
period  and  to  no  other,  perhaps  not  yet  born  in 
1800.  This  side  of  literature  is,  to  be  sure,  in 
large  measure  its  practical  and  intellectual  side, 
its  contribution  to  knowledge,  having  less  to  do 
with  the  aesthetic  denotements  of  charm  and 
beauty.  But  these  aesthetic  conceptions  themselves 
also  change.  The  ideal  of  beauty  is  by  no  means 
eternal.  A  representative  piece  of  literature  dur- 
ing the  past  fifty  years,  or  thirty  years,  is  a  sure 


12^  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

registration  of  this  shift  of  both  thought  and  feel- 
ing. 

To  give  an  illustration :  The  rise  and  spread  of 
the  doctrine  of  evolution  since  1850  is  the  cen- 
tury's mighty  contribution  to  science;  all  litera- 
ture since  1850,  beginning  with  such  a  master- 
piece as  Tennyson's  ^^In  Memoriam,"  feels  this 
change,  reflects  the  revolution  of  thought  that  is 
involved.  To  read  literature  before  1800,  to  the 
neglect  of  that  written  in  the  second  half  of  the 
century  just  closed,  is  to  be  hopelessly  out  of  touch 
with  all  modern  thinking,  to  show  oneself  an  in- 
tellectual faineant.  This  is  an  illustration  having 
in  mind  literature  as  intellectual  pabulum,  as 
mind-stuff.  But  take  literature  as  art,  too :  Since 
realism  so-called  became  the  dominant  creed, 
beauty,  the  aim  of  all  art,  has  come  to  be  regarded 
as  something  different  from  the  older  conception ; 
not  as  the  antithesis  to  truth,  not  a  prettification 
of  fact  or  a  falsification  thereof,  but  a  more  forci- 
ble presentation  of  truth  itself.  Hence,  in  the 
books  that  do  not  flinch  in  setting  down  the  dark 
and  terrible  in  human  life,  we  recognize  a  kind 
of  beauty — "the  still,  sad  music  of  humanity." 
Thus  the  notion  of  art  itself  has  widened,  I  say; 
our  idea  of  the  province  of  the  aesthetic  has  been 
stretched  to  admit  more  of  life,  of  reality.  And 
it  is  only  in  the  literature  of  the  last  half-century 
that  this  fruitful  lesson  has  been  learned ;  to  turn 
away  from  its  lesson  is  mentally  to  stunt  one- 
self. 


PAST  AND  PRESENT  IN  LITERATURE     123 

It  is  our  first  business  to  know  and  believe  in 
the  present,  upon  the  firm  basis  of  a  thorough 
culture  in  all  the  past  has  to  offer.  But  the  past 
should  be  studied  for  the  sake  of  the  present,  not 
vice  versa;  nor,  worse  yet,  by  a  grudging  conces- 
sion made  to  the  Now  in  the  reading  of  one  book 
to  the  prescribed  three  of  an  earlier  time.  I  am 
convinced  that  the  temper  of  mind  personified  in 
the  Bishop  of  London  comes  of  a  false  worship  of 
outgrown  gods.  An  old  man  fondly  idealizes  the 
days  of  his  own  youth,  whereas,  when  they  were 
being  lived  in,  he  grumbled  over  them  right  heart- 
ily. In  the  same  way,  some  people  grow  all  but 
maudlin  over  a  past  age  which,  were  it  the  present, 
they  would  be  the  first  to  satirize.  If  (which  God 
forbid!)  we  could  reverse  Time's  dial  and  be  set 
down  in  the  past,  to  wrestle  with  all  its  enormi- 
ties, we  should  then  find  (if  we  doubted  it  before) 
that  the  world  is  moving  forward,  not  backward, 
and  that  literature  has  responded  to  this  general 
law.  It  is  this  wholesome  truth  which  Mark 
Twain  inculcates  in  his  "A  Connecticut  Yankee 
in  King  Arthur's  Court,"  as  serious  a  book  as  was 
ever  writ. 

Nor  is  this  view  to  disparage  the  literary  past; 
to  deny  that  it  is  rich  in  writers  who  can  teach 
and  delight  us — spirits  who  still  rule  us  from  their 
urns:  Chaucer's  charm  of  musical  narrative  and 
homely  delineation;  Spenser's  linked  sweetness, 
as  he  cries  up  chivalric  deeds;  Shakspere  and  his 
fellows  and  soon-followers,    forming  the   golden 


124  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

time  of  letters;  the  seventeenth  century  with  its 
great  central  figure  of  Dryden;  the  early  eight- 
eenth, with  Addison,  Steele,  and  Swift;  the  mid- 
dle years,  bringing  that  wonderful  new  birth,  the 
novel,  in  the  hands  of  Eichardson,  Fielding,  and 
Smollett;  the  second  half,  with  Johnson,  Gold- 
smith, and  the  rest.  Even  to  run  thus  over  the 
names  of  a  few  mountain  peaks,  where  the  foot- 
hills and  valleys  hide  humbler  scenes  which  yet 
yield  us  everlasting  joy,  is  to  kindle  the  enthu- 
siasm of  the  sincere  lover  of  English  literature. 
To  read  and  know  and  love  those  earlier  authors 
is  not  only  to  add  to  our  stock  of  permanent  pleas- 
ure; it  is  to  be  instructed  in  the  development  of 
the  English  race,  since  in  its  literature  a  race  is 
best,  because  most  spontaneously,  reflected.  The 
finest  literature  of  a  period  is  always  the  truest 
exponent  of  that  time,  since  it  is  by  his  ideals  that 
we  properly  judge  the  aspiring  creature  called 
man.  The  high-water  mark  on  the  beach  alone 
registers  the  tide;  all  lower  wave  impulses  are 
obliterated. 

Then,  too,  there  is — and  rightly — an  illusion 
of  the  past  which  lends  a  fascination  to  older 
literature,  and  many  are  drawn  to  it  for  that  rea- 
son. This  attraction  is  in  response  to  what  may 
be  called  the  human  instinct  for  romance;  seen 
just  now  in  the  general  turning  to  historical  fic- 
tion. The  quaintness,  unwonted  color,  and  heroic 
proportions  assumed  by  what  is  remote  in  time 
help  to  produce  this  well-nigh  thaumaturgic  effect. 


PAST  AND  PRESENT  IN  LITERATURE    125 

an  effect  most  enjoyable  and,  within  proper  limits, 
perfectly  legitimate. 

But  all  possible  concessions  being  made,  it  re- 
mains true  that  the  disproportionate  estimate  of 
the  literary  past  in  contrast  with  the  present — as 
exampled  in  the  statement  attributed,  I  hope  er- 
roneously, to  the  Bishop  of  London — is  a  form  of 
affectation  or  ignorance  which  should  be  met  with 
candid  hostility  whencesoever  it  comes.  The  stu- 
dent should  be  reared  to  a  reverential  admiration 
for  the  literary  riches  of  the  last  one  hundred  years, 
which  it  is  his  privilege  to  be  born  into ;  the  lover 
of  books  should,  in  the  very  light  of  his  knowledge 
of  the  past,  come  to  a  fuller  appreciation  of  the 
glories  of  a  later  day.  And  the  critic  should  be 
constantly  on  guard  against  the  insidious  danger 
of  an  unbalanced  admiration  for  some  pet  school 
or  author  or  period,  lest  his  sense  of  relative  values 
■ — so  essential  to  any  real  criticism — ^be  lost  and  he 
fall  into  the  habit  of  belittling  the  larger  and  over- 
praising that  which  is  of  less  moment.  Young 
folk,  as  a  rule,  have  a  natural  and  healthy  interest 
in  the  present — including  the  literary  present. 
They  are  pretty  likely  to  read  current  books  rather 
than  those  which  are  older.  Therefore,  it  is  prob- 
able that  the  Bishop's  sort  of  suggestion,  made  to 
college  students,  would  be  comparatively  innocu- 
ous. But  those  same  young  folk,  when  they  come 
to  maturity,  might  act  in  accordance  with  the  ad- 
vice; might  even  take  to  heart  Charles  Lamb's 
whimsical  saying,  that  whenever  a  new  volume 


126  FORCES  12^  FICTION 

appeared  he  read  an  old  one.  And  if  the  habit 
of  regarding  contemporaneous  literature  with  sus- 
picion were  thus  formed,  the  result  would  be  an 
unhappy  one.  A  belief  in  the  present,  whether  it 
be  literature  or  life  which  makes  literature  pos- 
sible, is,  when  you  come  to  think  of  it,  a  belief 
in  the  great  laws  and  unfolding  potentialities  of 
the  universe.  Life  greatens  toward  the  light,  and 
the  nineteenth  century  is  the  heir  of  the  ages. 
Let  us  rejoice  in  it. 


f  UNIVERSfTY   1 


THE  USE  OF  ENGLISH 

If  the  study  of  the  English  language  in  its  uses 
and  abuses  seem  dry  and  repellent,  it  is,  I  must 
think,  the  fault  of  the  pedant  who  handles  it. 
Few  things  are  of  more  general  interest  to  those 
who  use  English  speech — and  what  a  vast  army 
they  make — than  the  manipulation  of  the  mother 
tongue  in  its  manifold  meanings.  We  all  use  En- 
glish whether  we  will  or  no;  alas,  how  many  of 
us  misuse  it!  To  be  sure,  one  may  be  born  into 
English,  grow  up,  love,  pay  taxes,  and  be  buried 
in  it,  with  the  same  unconsciousness  of  its  privi- 
leges and  demands  as  that  displayed  by  M.  Jour- 
dain  with  regard  to  the  use  of  prose.  Still,  to  all 
who  enjoyed  the  advantages  of  some  schooling,  the 
right  uses  of  this  linguistic  opportunity  is  not  a 
matter  of  indifference.  The  great  majority  of 
English  speakers  and  writers  come  to  a  conscious 
love  of  the  language.  It  is  a  thing  inwrought  with 
their  life  and  the  life  of  others  near  and  dear.  No 
language  is  a  dead  thing,  though  the  dry  scientific 
analysis  of  scholars  lead  wrongly  to  that  opinion. 
Rather,  is  each  a  mighty  store-house  of  human 
treasures ;  a  musical  instrument,  listening  to  which 
one  may  hear  an  infinitude  of  melodies.  Men 
have  for  centuries  laughed  and  loved  in  it,  sworn 
and  been  forsworn,  hated  and  hoped,  yea,  lived 

127 


128  FORGES   IN   FICTION 

and  died.  No  wonder  if  it  be  a  symphonic  crea- 
ture, full  of  crashing  harmonies,  of  the  caresses 
of  poetry,  of  tumultuous  discords,  and  of  divine 
songs  of  peace. 

If  this  be  true  of  any  tongue,  it  is  emphatically 
true  of  a  dominant  tongue  like  the  English — 
native  in  so  many  lands,  spoken  under  so  many 
skies,  so  militant  in  its  march,  so  plastic  in  its 
manifold  adaptations  to  the  needs  of  its  children. 
It  is  a  tongue  made  splendid  by  more  than  a  thou- 
sand years  of  great  literature.  It  is  the  home 
speech  of  more  folk  than  those  who  make  populous 
the  shores  of  Kipling^s  seven  seas.  The  history 
of  words  and  of  the  sentences  into  which  they 
fall,  is  no  dry  record  of  bloodless  facts,  but  as 
dramatic  as  the  history  of  mankind;  indeed,  it  is 
the  history'  of  man  as  he  has  crystallized  into  a 
sound-symbol  the  thoughts,  imaginings,  faiths 
and  aspirations  of  his  life,  from  the  cave  dwellers 
to  the  Darwin  of  his  century.  Words,  like  men, 
have  their  "strange,  eventful  histories,"  and,  again 
like  men,  one  word  in  its  time  "plays  many  parts." 
To  follow  the  ups  and  downs  of  a  single  proper 
noun — a  stupid  name  since  its  career  is  as  often 
as  not  improper  and  hence  doubly  fascinating — or 
of  a  common  noun — named  with  equal  stupidity, 
since  its  story  is  likely  to  be  most  uncommon — this 
pursuit,  I  say,  is  often  as  exciting  as  a  novel  or  a 
foot-ball  game.  Thus  it  follows  that  the  diction- 
ary (rightly  used  and  comprehended)  is  the  most 
interesting  of  all  books,  save  perhaps  the  Bible. 


THE    USE   OF   ENGLISH  139 

Dr.  Holmes  knew  this  when  he  made  the  Auto- 
crat say:  ^'^When  I  feel  inclined  to  read  poetry 
I  take  down  my  dictionary.  The  poetry  of  words 
is  quite  as  beautiful  as  that  of  sentences.  The 
author  may  arrange  the  gems  effectively,  but  their 
shape  and  luster  have  been  given  by  the  attrition 
of  ages.  Bring  me  the  finest  simile  from  the 
whole  range  of  imaginative  writing,  and  I  will 
show  you  a  single  word  which  conveys  a  more  pro- 
found, a  more  accurate,  and  a  more  eloquent 
analogy."  Emerson  had  the  same  feeling  when  he 
wrote :  "It  does  not  need  that  a  poem  should  be 
long.     Every  word  was  once  a  poem." 

As  a  matter  of  personal  testimony,  I  may  say 
that  I  never  open  a  dictionary  without  a  conscious 
quiver  of  excitement  at  the  likelihood  of  a  sensa- 
tional experience.  It  is  almost  a  miracle  that  such 
a  study  has  had  the  power  of  converting  living 
men  (scholars,  in  the  ordinary  parlance)  into  dry- 
asdusts.  One  would  suppose  it  might  have  an  ef- 
fect analogous  to  that  of  earth-contact  upon 
Antaeus.  I  dare  say  it  is  because  they  have  studied 
the  bones,  not  the  flesh  and  blood  of  language, 
making  themselves  scientists  instead  of  amateurs 
of  life.  For  language,  in  reality,  is  a  manifesta- 
tion of  life,  and  always  that.  The  dead  languages, 
we  say,  meaning  the  people  are  dead  who  spoke 
them ;  which  is  no  fault  of  the  tongue  itself,  which 
lives  lustily  on  in  its  literature. 

It  will  do  no  harm,  now,  to  illustrate  the  state- 
ment as  to  the  essential  poetry,  pathos  and  drama 


130  FORGE 8   IN  FICTION 

inherent  in  these  vital  word-symbols.  And  first, 
a  striking  example  of  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  same 
word.  The  nonn  cwen  in  Old  English  had  the 
generic  significance  of  "woman/'  with  no  reference 
to  station  or  moral  status.  In  the  course  of  time, 
and  with  a  modified  spelling,  it  appeared  tricked 
out  as  our  modern  English  queen,  a  sovereign  of 
the  people — ^the  highest  earthly  lot  attainable  by 
the  sex.  And  yet,  in  another  dress  of  letters — 
for  spelling  has  played  a  part  in  the  drama  of 
words  like  to  that  played  by  clothes  among  human- 
ity— it  paraded  itself  in  Elizabethan  times  and 
still  lives  as  quean, — a  common  drab,  a  painted 
woman  of  the  town !  These  two  words  from  the 
selfsame  ancestor,  differentiated  by  a  garb  of  let- 
ters, run  the  gamut  of  woman's  social  and  moral 
possibilities.  Surely  nothing  could  be  more  im- 
pressive; a  single  noun,  yet  a  whole  sermon  on 
sex! 

Think,  too,  how  personal  names  lend  themselves 
to  picturesque  effects.  Duns  Scotus  was  in  the 
thirteenth  century  a  great  scholar,  the  last  of  the 
great  schoolmen ;  but,  like  other  great  men  before 
and  since,  he  had  enemies,  who  called  him  unpleas- 
ant epithets  and  jeered  at  his  philosophy,  until 
his  nick-name  Duns  became  with  them  a  term  of 
reproach  and  ridicule.  And  behold!  we  say 
"dunce"  to-day  to  the  stupid  schoolboy  who  wears 
the  conical  cap  in  the  corner.  The  wisest  man  of 
his  time  gives  the  tongue  its  stock  designation  for 
a  fool!     It  were  well  for  dunces  to  realize  how 


THE    USE    OF   ENGLISH  131 

honorable  a  pedigree  they  boast  of.  Let  me  illus- 
trate once  more.  Dickens  in  his  ^^Tale  of  Two 
Cities"  speaks  of  the  "figure  of  that  sharp  female 
called  La  Guillotine."  There  is  a  popular  notion 
abroad  that  Dr.  Guillotin  was  the  inventor  of  that 
terrible  machine  whose  maw  was  fed  with  such  dras- 
tic food  during  the  red  days  of  the  Terror  in  France 
the  unfortunate.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  to  one 
Dr.  Louis  belongs  the  dubious  honor  of  the  in- 
vention. Guillotin  was  a  man  of  mercy  who  in 
the  very  year  of  the  outbreak  of  the  French  Eevo- 
lution  advocated  the  abolition  of  this  grim  method 
of  capital  punishment.  And  the  people,  forsooth, 
with  tremendous  irony,  set  his  blameless  name 
upon  an  instrument  of  extermination  which  bears 
in  the  minds  of  men  a  bad  eminence,  like  Milton's 
Satan.  The  sardonic  satire  of  history  has  few 
more  striking  examples. 

These  instances  of  the  weatherings  of  words 
typify  a  host  more,  and  may  serve  to  illuminate 
my  thesis  that  all  that  man  has  thought  and  felt 
is  registered  in  language,  which  therefore  offers 
a  study  of  widest  scope  and  of  thrilling  interest. 

It  seems  an  ironic  comment  upon  the  inutility 
of  education  that  language,  in  proportion  as  it  be- 
comes learned,  grows  colorless,  abstract,  formal, 
and  unexciting.  The  speech  of  the  philosopher  is 
not  only  hard  to  be  understood  by  the  people,  but 
seemingly  stripped  of  all  life  and  color,  whereas  the 
talk  of  the  huckster  on  the  street,  the  craftsman  in 
the  shop,  or  the  sailor  on  the  sea  has  a  smack,  an 


132  FORGES   IN   FICTION 

idiosyncrasy,  that  makes  it  relishable.  Their 
words  are  at  once  concrete  and  imaginative.  Yet, 
since  all  language  roots  in  metaphor,  the  abstruse 
lingo  of  a  Kant  was  once  of  imagination  all  com- 
pact. The  palest  word-medium  of  to-day  is  the 
metaphor  of  by-gone  years ;  the  most  brilliant  pic- 
ture-coin of  the  present  will  become  the  outworn 
counter  of  the  future.  Language  when  handled 
by  children  is  instructive,  for  a  child  in  this  re- 
gard stands  for  the  youth  of  the  race.  We  com- 
monly speak  of  the  little  folk  as  unconscious  poets 
and  for  this  very  reason :  they  talk  in  tropes,  their 
fancies  are  expressed  in  figures.  As  the  analytic 
processes  of  maturity  gain  on  the  intuitive,  crea- 
tive acts  of  speech,  this  imaginative  element  slow- 
ly disappears,  until  it  is  only  the  grown-up 
poet  (who  in  this  respect  preserves  his  childlike- 
ness)  that  dares  to  use  language  in  an  unconven- 
tional way, — in  which  use  he  is  joined,  however, 
'by  the  unlettered  all  about,  whose  conversation, 
being  offhand  and  instinctive,  and  being,  more- 
over, vitally  related  to  their  interests  and  occupa- 
tions, has  the  savor  of  real  things  and  a  certain 
fresh  felicity.  It  is  also  instructive  to  see  how, 
with  all  of  us,  our  speech  is  happy  when  we  are 
most  at  ease  and  hence  most  natural ;  the  drawing- 
room  garb  and  the  drawing-room  idiom  are  alike 
drearily  limited.  The  same  people  who  in  the 
street  or  at  their  business  will  be  racy  of  speech, 
wax  Jejune  and  uninspiring  under  the  social 
lamps.     Evening  dress  seems  to  throttle  idiom. 


THE    USE   OF   ENGLISH  133 

This  leads  us  to  a  plain  fact  as  to  the  origin  of 
language:  it  is  the  birth  of  instinct^  of  emotion, 
of  imagination;  not  a  reasoned-out  process  but  a 
creative  impulse;  a  blundering  yet  puissant  effort 
of  man's  genius.  Whatever  our  theory  of  the  be- 
ginning of  speech,  this  holds  true.  And  it  is  a 
truth  with  a  direct  bearing  upon  all  present-day 
questions  of  language-use — a  veritable  search- 
light in  the  fog. 

Granting,  now,  the  attractions  of  this  study,  a 
remark  must  be  made  as  to  the  certificate  of  au- 
thority in  matters  of  language.  Plain  speaking 
is  in  place  here.  People  discuss  questions  of 
speech-use  with  the  same  freedom  with  which  they 
comment  upon  the  weather ;  this  is  the  immemora- 
ble  parade  ground  of  cock-sure  judgments.  In- 
numerable little  friendly  battles  are  fought  upon 
this  or  that  moot-point  and  there  is  a  general  feel- 
ing that  one  man  is  as  good  as  another  in  the  con- 
test. This  is  all  well  enough  for  the  innocuous 
tilts  of  society;  but  if  the  point  at  issue  be  taken 
seriously,  it  is  well  to  remember  that  in  this  sub- 
ject, as  in  all  others,  the  specialists  must  decide. 
No  person  of  culture  familiar  with  the  present- 
day  uses  of  English,  but  lacking  knowledge  of  the 
tongue  in  its  historical  development,  is  in  a  posi- 
tion to  lay  down  the  law.  This  is  why  many  popu- 
lar books  upon  words  and  their  uses  are  often 
misleading  and  darken  counsel.  These  authors 
may  be  intelligent,  they  may  have  considerable 
acquaintance  with  current  linguistic  habits;  but 


134  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

they  are  not  philologists;  and  it  is  the  language- 
student  and  he  alone  who  is  wise  in  the  premises. 
In  other  spheres  of  human  knowledge  this  prin- 
ciple is  acted  upon;  it  must  be  held  to  firmly 
here. 

Many  so-called  vulgarisms  may  be  explained  if 
not  excused  by  an  appeal  to  the  history  of  English 
words.  The  wayfaring  man  says  ^^six  year  ago" 
and  ^^six  head  of  cattle,"  omitting  the  plural  sign ; 
the  one  expression  would  be  called  vulgar,  the 
other  vernacular,  idiomatic.  But  both  have  his- 
torical ground ;  they  look  back  to  a  time  when  the 
plural  significance  was. indicated  not  by  the  addi- 
tion of  s,  as  in  the  modern  speech,  but  by  the 
genitive  case,  "six  year"  being  in  reality,  in  its 
older  form  "six  of  years"  (Old  English,  six 
geara).  And  the  instinct  of  idiom  has  preserved 
even  to  our  own  day  this  thousand-year-old  fact. 
Again,  in  the  analogous  phrase  "a  six  foot  cable," 
we  see  exactly  the  same  principle  at  work.  It  is 
more  idiomatic  still  to  give  the  old  form.  Imagine 
calling  it  a  "six  feet  cable !"  Yet  even  the  keenly 
intelligent  who  discuss  language  on  the  basis  of 
merely  current  usage  will  be  forced  for  consis- 
tency's sake  to  favor  that  form  of  the  phrase,  al- 
though puzzled  to  find  that,  somehow,  it  quite, 
lacks  the  right  flavor. 

In  the  same  way,  a  knowledge  of  word  lineage 
sheds  light  upon  pronunciation.  An  examination 
of  English  literature  from  earliest  times  down  to 
the  present,  teaches  the  student  that  a  general  law 


THE   U8E   OF   ENGLISH  135 

of  accent  is  at  work  in  our  language.  It  may  be 
called  the  radical  tendency  of  our  tongue  in  this 
matter;  the  tendency  to  move  the  accent  ba,ck  to 
the  root  syllable.  A  tendency  at  variance  to  this 
is  that  of  euphony,  which  in  polysyllabic  words 
demands  such  distribution  of  emphasis  as  shall 
satisfy  the  ear;  and  in  all  words  requires  some 
attention  to  musical  values.  But  this  is  minor 
to  the  major  law  of  the  backward- working  accent. 
Foreign  words  introduced  into  our  tongue,  are  at 
first  pronounced  after  their  native  laws :  but  just 
in  proportion  as  they  become  anglicised,  do  they 
fall  under  this  rule,  their  accent  receding  towards 
the  root  or  (in  case  the  root  and  first  syllable  do 
not  agree)  to  the  first  syllable  of  the  word.  Thus, 
in  Marlowe's  play,  "The  Jew  of  Malta,"  occurs  the 
line : 

And  with  extorting,  cozening  forfeifing, 

where  the  accent  of  the  last  word  must,  to  the  best 
results  of  music,  fall  upon  the  second  syllable: 
while  to-day  it  has  reached  the  first  syllable,  for'- 
f citing.  The  word  being  French,  this  earlier  pro- 
nunciation is  just  what  one  would  expect.  .  Com- 
ing a  hundred  years  nearer  our  own  time,  we  find 
in  Milton's  "Paradise  Lost"  the  line : 

Their  planetary  motions  and  aspects'. 

In  this  case,  a  Latin  word  is,  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  naturally,  more  conscious  of  its  origin 


136  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

than  is  the  case  now^,  when,  more  thoroughly  En- 
glish, it  receives  the  native  accent  as'pects. 

Moving  another  hundred  years  toward  the  pres- 
ent time,  in  Thomas  Grey's  ^'^Sketch  of  His  Own 
Character"  the  opening  lines  run  as  follows : 

Too  poor  for  a  hrihe  and  too  proud  to  impor'tune. 
He  had  not  the  method  for  making  a  fortune. 

Here,  obviously,  the  end  of  the  first  line  is  made 
to  rhyme  with  fortune.  The  present  pronuncia- 
tion of  the  word  is,  however,  im'portune' ;  that  is 
to  say,  it  has  moved  back  to  the  first  syllable,  with 
a  secondary  accent  on  the  third.  Eobert  Brown- 
ing, with  the  older  accentuation  in  mind,  has  ven- 
tured in  one  of  his  poems  to  use  impor'tune. 

The  value  of  having  this  general  principle  clear- 
ly in  mind  is  shown  when  it  comes  to  be  applied 
to  certain  words  which  at  a  given  moment  seem 
to  be  trembling  in  the  balance  between  the  older 
and  the  newer  accent.  Thus,  acces'sory  and  ac'ces- 
sory;  which?  The  latter,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  that  is  the  stress  destined,  by  the  law  of  reces- 
sive accent,  to  prevail. 

Likewise,  of  inqui'ry  and  in'quiry,  the  last  is 
preferable,  for  the  same  reason.  It  would  be  mov- 
ing directly  against  a  deep-lying  linguistic  law — 
a  tendency  inherent  in  the  speech  of  the  race — to 
try  to  make  inqui'ry  and  acces'sory  exclusive  good 
use,  at  the  expense  of  the  later  and  better  usage. 
As  well  might  a  child  attempt  to  check  a  tidal 
wave.     Current  good  usage  must  always  be  care- 


THE    U8E   OF   ENGLISH  lS7i 

fully  observed;  but  without  the  corrective  knowl- 
edge of  facts  lying  behind  the  present  show  of 
things,  it  is  a  dangerous  guide ;  it  is  the  flower  of 
which  the  historic  life  is  the  hidden  but  potent 
root. 

Another  and  important  service  rendered  by  a 
thorough  knowledge  of  English  old  and  new,  is 
that  it  develops  a  sensitiveness  to  the  vernacular, 
and  a  liking  for  the  native  word,  phrase,  idiom. 
Simplicity,  strength,  and  beauty  in  speech  are  ap- 
preciated above  a  quasi  or  questionable  elegance. 
There  is  a  deal  of  culture  in  that  feeling  for  lan- 
guage which  gives  preference  to  the  idiom  go  to 
hed  over  to  retire.  The  former  stands  for  a  large 
class  of  plain,  direct,  homely  expressions,  too  often 
avoided  by  the  linguistically  ill-educated.  When 
one  falls  into  conversation  with  a  stranger,  one 
may  judge  him  infallibly  by  this  test :  a  brief  ex- 
change of  small  talk  reveals  his  station  and  degree 
with  awful  certainty — far  more  surely  than  do  his 
dress  and  carriage.  The  habit  of  shoddy  expres- 
sion in  speech  when  one  is  desirous  of  making  a 
good  impression  is  astonishingly  prevalent.  In 
sooth,  it  takes  something  of  education  to  feel  the 
full  value  of  a  vigorous  simplicity  of  utterance. 
The  taste  for  a  sort  of  bastard  Websterianism  of 
speech  for  the  purposes  of  ordinary  conversation 
is,  I  fear,  peculiarly  American :  a  survival,  too,  of 
older  conditions.  Dickens  satirizes  this  manner  of 
talk  in  ^^Martin  Chuzzlewit,"  unkindly,  perhaps, 
but  hardly  untruly — for  the  year  of  grace  1842.  It 


138  FORGES   IN  FICTION 

is  less  fashionable  now,  just  as  the  old-time  oratory 
is  less  fashionable,  being  supplanted  by  the  terse, 
pithy,  plain-spoken  style  of  public  utterance.  In 
this  matter  of  vernacular  directness  our  cousins 
English  have  always  set  us  a  good  example, — one 
we  are  slowly  but  surely  learning  to  follow.  In 
the  past,  there  may  have  lurked  in  our  minds  a 
conviction  that  the  free  use  of  euphuistic,  absurdly 
showy  words  for  very  simple  things  was  a  sign  of 
the  possession  of  savoir  faire:  as  confidence  grows 
along  with  experience,  the  speech  clarifies  and 
takes  on  a  seemly  plainness. 

So  inspiriting  is  it  to  hear  truly  idiomatic  En- 
glish— ^English  with  grip  to  it  as  well  as  grace — • 
that  the  pleasure  breeds  leniency  toward  that 
abuse  of  idiom  commonly  called  "slang."  The 
relations  of  the  two  have  scarcely  been  set  forth  to 
satisfaction. 

The  kinship  of  slang  and  idiom  is  very  close. 
They  are  blood-relations.  Indeed,  it  might  al- 
most be  said  that  one  is  the  other  under  a  sobri- 
quet. Slang  is  often  but  idiom  in  the  making. 
The  idiom  of  to-day  was  slang  in  Shakspere's 
time;  and  the  slang  of  this  year  may  become  ac- 
credited idiom  a  century  hence.  Nevertheless,  the 
word  slang,  together  with  such  other  words  as  dia- 
lect, patois,  argot,  and  their  like,  has  something 
of  a  sinister  implication;  and  it  will  be  well  to 
examine  the  case  to  see  if  the  popular  feeling 
about  it  be  justified. 

Slang  in  the  common  meaning,  is  not  only  col- 


THE   USE   OF  ENGLISH  139 

loquial  speech,  but  speech  that  is  low,  vulgar;  any 
good  dictionary  definition  supports  this  statement. 
Skeat,  the  authority  in  English  etymology,  derives 
the  word,  no  doubt  properly,  from  an  ancient  Scan- 
dinavian original  which  is  seen  in  our  verb  to 
sling — so  that  when  in  our  jocular  American  way 
we  speak  of  ^^slinging  language,"  we  are  going 
back  to  root  flavors.  Slang  is  language  which  is 
slung  about  recklessly,  not  to  say  profanely.  It 
cannot  be  denied  that  some  hard  things  are  truth- 
fully to  be  spoken  in  its  disfavor.  Some  of  it  is 
gutter-born  and  naturally  dies  the  death  of  all 
disreputable  outcasts.  A  good  deal  of  it  falls 
from  the  lips  of  thieves,  gypsies,  tramps  and  other 
such  motley  classes  of  society,  regarded  for  the 
most  part  as  outside  the  pale  of  decency.  An  ap- 
preciable amount  of  it,  at  least,  is  obscure,  because 
of  an  inadmissible  technicality;  and,  worse  still, 
is  unimaginatively  narrow  and  unpicturesque — 
qualities  that  condemn  it  to  a  short  life,  and  pre- 
clude its  having  any  life  that  is  more  than  local 
and  uncertain.  I  have  sometimes  thought  in  noting 
the  informal  dialect  of  college  students  that  they 
should  have  been  able  to  show  better  invention  in 
their  creation  of  a  fraternal  jargon;  it  lacks 
variety,  verve,  inspiration.  It  is  but  justice  to 
them  to  say  that  sometimes  they  live  up  to  their 
opportunity  and  are  racily  original.  But  there 
is  a  reason  for  the  fact  that  a  good  share  of  the 
slang  so  called — ^perhaps  half  of  what  is  widely 
current  at  a  given  moment — ^perishes  and  perishes 


140  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

deservedly.  If  one  interested  in  this  stimulating 
subject  will  take  the  trouble  to  register  half  a 
dozen  of  the  prevalent  slang  expressions  at  a  cer- 
tain date  and  will  then  refer  to  them  a  couple  of 
years  thereafter,  he  will  be  instructed  to  his  satis- 
faction in  the  ephemerality  of  much  of  this  un- 
conventional current  idiom. 

Yet  this  is  only  half  the  story.  I  implied  as 
much  in  speaking  of  the  inter-relations.  Not  all 
slang  is  bad:  some  of  it  is  good,  nay,  delightful. 
It  is  created  just  as  all  living  language  is  created 
— impulsively,  with  a  certain  joy  in  the  creation, 
and  at  the  call  of  the  genuine  need.  It  is  an  at- 
tempt at  picturesqueness,  liveliness,  reality,  and 
when  it  is  not  brought  forth  for  too  narrowly  spe- 
cial a  use  nor  by  a  parent  morally  debased,  the 
slang  word  or  expression  is  quite  often  acceptable. 
If  this  seems  over-praise,  conversion  to  the  view 
will  follow  an  examination  of  the  facts.  People  are 
often  shocked  by  a  felicitous  but  unconventional 
idiom  (which  they  call  slang)  not  so  much  because 
their  feelings  are  really  outraged  as  because  they 
imagine  it  is  their  duty  to  be  shocked.  It  is  a 
case  of  mock  modesty;  in  their  hearts  there  is  a 
guilty  enjoyment  of  such  language.  The  real 
question  is  that  of  actual  vulgarity;  because  the 
idiom  is  new  or,  what  is  taken  to  be  the  same 
thing,  unknown,  is  no  condemnation.  This  deeper- 
going  question  lies  behind  it:  is  the  expression 
coarse,  offensive  to  good  taste,  or  out-and-out 
immoral  ?    And  to  pronounce  upon  this  is  a  very 


THE   USE   OP   ENGLISH  141 

delicate  test  of  one's  knowledge  of  language,  litera- 
ture, even  of  life  itself. 

'Now  it  is  just  the  language-wielder  with  a  feel- 
ing for  idiom  based  upon  a  generous  knowledge 
of  English  past  and  present,  who  is  at  once  bold 
yet  careful  in  his  relation  to  slang,  so  called. 
Aware  of  the  fact  that  slang  is  often  excellent 
new  idiom,  he  uses  it  with  little  fear  of  results; 
while  he  has,  in  his  sensitiveness  to  what  is  truly- 
good  English,  an  all  but  infallible  touchstone  by 
which  to  detect  the  merely  low  and  ephemeral. 
It  follows  that  his  language  is  delightfully  free 
from  pedantic  stiffness  or  mawkish  euphuism.  It 
possesses  the  racy  quality  that  is  the  very  salt  of 
speech,  and  a  freedom  that  strikes  prudes  as 
audacious  at  times,  yet  has  a  felicity  recognizable 
even  by  those  who  have  neither  the  courage  nor  the 
education  to  go  and  do  likewise.  He  prefers  to 
handle  the  native  vocabulary  ^^After  the  use  of 
the  English  in  straight-flung  words  and  few,"  as 
Kipling  has  it.  He  knows  that  the  foreign  ele- 
ments of  a  tongue  are  for  ornamentation  or  special 
application;  that  the  vernacular  is  the  back-bone. 

It  is  in  respect  of  such  considerations  that  a 
study  of  English,  an  interest  in  the  mother  speech 
extending  far  beyond  the  days  of  formal  school- 
ing, commend  themselves  to  all.  There  is  an  ex- 
haustless  attraction  in  it.  Moreover,  an  assured 
comprehension  of  the  subject  is  the  best  possible 
basis  for  all  appreciation  of  our  literature  from 
Beowulf  to  Browning, — is,  in  fact,  the  only  safe 


142  FORGES  IN  FICTION 

and  sure  substracture  for  any  literary  apprecia- 
tion. One  who  begins  the  study  of  Chaucer,  of 
Spenser  or  of  Shakspere  without  this  advantage, 
trips  on  the  first  page ;  it  is  inevitable.  Thus  the 
study  of  language  and  the  study  of  literature, 
though  unfortunately  too  much  treated  as  if  they 
were  utterly  apart,  the  one  a  science,  the  other 
an  art,  are  in  reality  so  closely  co-ordinate  as  to  be 
but  phases  of  the  one  great  subject;  language  the 
instrument,  literature  the  alluring,  the  inspiriting, 
the  multitudinous  airs  that  can  be  played  upon  it. 


A  NOTE  ON  MODERN  CRITICISM 

Literary  criticism  has  always  been  of  two  main 
kinds:  the  objective,  which  applies  rules  and  be- 
lieves in  standards;  the  subjective,  which,  with 
less  care  for  canons,  gives  freer  play  to  personal 
impressions.  Some  of  the  later  doyens  of  letters 
belong  to  the  impressionistic  school,  but  of  old 
the  weight  of  authority  was  with  those  who  ap- 
pealed to  tradition.  And  there  was  an  authority 
in  this  method,  a  stability  and  dignity  in  the  judg- 
ments thug  reached,  which  made  them  imposing, 
even  admirable.  Nisard  summed  up  the  creed  in 
saying :  ''1  could  not  love  without  preferring,  and 
I  could  not  prefer  without  doing  injustice."  The 
personal  equation  is  here  reduced  to  the  vanishing 
point.  Jeffrey,  with  his  famous  critique  of  Words- 
worth, beginning,  "This  will  never  do,"  affords  a 
fine  example  of  the  same  thing.  A  nobler  illustra- 
tion is  Matthew  Arnold,  whose  appeal  to  compari- 
sons and  insistence  on  a  standard  are  academic 
in  the  best  eense.  In  the  hands  of  such  a  man, 
objective  criticism  is  discovered  to  be  full  of  vir- 
tues. But  with  an  older  school — ^with  Boileau  in 
France,  to  name  one  leader — ^the  danger  was  a 
stiffening  into  the  mechanical,  loss  of  breadth,  and 
insensitiveness  to  an  enlightened  enjoyment  as  the 
ultimate  test. 

U8 


144  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

With  Sainte-Beuve,  however  (still  looking  to 
France,  the  land  of  criticism,  par  excellence), 
came  a  change.  Taine,  Renan,  younger  men  like 
Jules  Lemaitre,  with  all  their  personal  variations, 
admit  more  of  the  subjective,  see  the  subject 
through  the  color  of  their  temperament;  and  of 
Xmodem  criticism  as  a  whole  it  may  be  said  that  it 
has  become  autobiographical.  The  critic  an- 
nounces :  "Gentlemen,  I  propose  to  talk  of  myself 
in  relation  to  Shakspere,  Eacine,  Pascal,  Goethe." 
In  some  cases  this  is  pushed  to  an  absurd  or  of- 
fensive degree,  until  we  get  a  parody  on  literary 
judgments.  But  Mr.  William  M.  Payne,  in  his 
recent  book,  "Little  Leaders,"  goes  too  far  in  his 
condemnation  of  the  subjective  test.  Professor 
Trent,  in  a  well-considered  paper  to  be  found  in  a 
still  later  volume  of  essays,  views  the  matter  more 
broadly  when  he  points  out  the  share  of  truth  in 
both  the  objective  and  subjective  methods.  Many 
of  our  ablest  and  most  charming  writers  favor  it : 
Stevenson,  for  an  Englishman  (who  isn't  En- 
glish), Howells,  for  an  American.  The  advan- 
tages of  the  latter  are  obvious:  appreciating  the 
truth  in  de  gustihus,  the  critic  gives  his  opinion 
for  what  it  is  worth,  tolerant  of  dispute  or  dissent. 
He  becomes  intimate  with  us :  we  are  more  likely 
to  love  him.  In  addition  to  stimulation  in  litera- 
ture, we  are  having  dealings  with  a  strong,  pleas- 
ing personality,  perhaps.  The  gain  here  is  all  in 
the  direction  of  life,  savor,  reality.  On  the  other 
hand,  a  besetting  sin  of  this  method  is  lack  of 


A   NOTE    ON   MODERN    CRITICISM       145 

culture.  Any  one  can  set  up  to  write  esoteric  crit- 
icism. But  when,  as  with  M.  Lemaitre,  there  is 
wide  reading,  an  assimilation  of  the  best  models, 
the  issue,  be  it  confessed,  is  delightful. 

In  all  likelihood,  the  question  will  always  be 
debatable.  The  modern  tendency,  no  doubt,  leans  ; 
towards  the  subjective;  individualism  for  the  mo- 
ment is  paramount  in  literature.  The  pendulum 
swings  to  that  side  of  equilibrium.  Personal  pref- 
erence is  the  starting-point  of  all  honest  enjoy- 
ment and  appreciation  of  literature.  To  praise  a 
book  because  we  think  it  ought  to  be  praised,  not 
because  we  find  it  praiseworthy,  is  intellectual  sui- 
cide. Yet  few  of  us  wish  to  go  so  far  as  to  deny 
that  literary  art  has  some  permanent  laws  and 
standards.  The  slow  consensus  of  the  best  opinion 
(with  some  erratic  individual  variations)  rallies 
around  the  works  which  obey  these  laws  and  con- 
form to  these  standards.  To  listen  to  the  still, 
small  voice  within,  and  yet  to  find  a  reason-for- 
being  in  the  voice  of  time  and  authority,  that  is 
the  delicate  and  difficult  business  of  the  serious- 
minded  critic.  The  present-day  tendency  alluded 
to  is  an  exaggeration,  but,  if  an  excess,  it  must  be 
wholesomer,  truer  than  the  other,  earlier  excess, 
which  stretched  every  literary  creation  upon  the 
narrow  Procrustean  bed  of  convention  and  judged 
its  size  thereby. 

To  justify  the  modern  tendency  it  must  be 
shown  that  the  long-cherished  dicta  pronouncing 
art  a  thing  of  rule  and  standard,  of  well-defined 


146  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

laws  and  unsurpassable  boundaries,  are  not  found- 
ed upon  fact;  or  at  least,  have  been  given  undue 
prominence.  The  latter  hits  near  to  the  truth. 
There  is  more  argument  for  this  thesis  than  at 
first  appears.  An  illustrative  analogy  may  be 
drawn  from  the  sister  art  of  music.  Our  concep- 
tions of  what  is  right  and  beautiful  in  the  aesthetic 
tone- world  are  based  upon  the  seven-note  scale; 
but  with  the  Chinese,  for  example,  the  five-note 
scale  is  the  norm  and  starting  point.  Truly,  it  is 
a  purely  subjective  process  of  reasoning  to  assert 
that  good  music  necessarily  derives  from  the  seven- 
note  scale.  The  ear  of  most  modern  peoples  ac- 
cepts that  scale,  and  rejects  that  of  the  Mongolians 
as  displeasing;  voila  tout.  The  whole  development 
of  European  music  on  its  technical  side  rests  thus 
upon  an  assumption  it  would  take  more  than  the 
subtlest  metaphysics  of  a  schoolman  to  show  to  be 
anything  but  unproved.  At  the  best,  an  appeal 
to  the  history  of  music  might  force  us  to  concede 
that  the  western  scale  has  given  to  the  world  richer 
results;  that  the  civilized  folk  have  adopted  the 
octave  while  those  semi-civilized  or  worse  have  in- 
vented the  five-note  or  other  scales.  But  who  dare 
say  that  some  scale  of  the  future  shall  not  produce 
music  as  superior  to  that  made  upon  the  seven-note 
idea  as  the  latter  is  superior  to  the  five-note  ?  In 
other  words,  musical  technique  is  bottomed  upon 
an  arbitrary  standard  and  not  upon  eternal  laws. 
It  is  relative,  not  absolute,  in  its  nature.  In  the 
domain  of  ethics  a  similar  substitution  of  relative 


A   NOTE   ON   MODERN    CRITICISM       147 

for  absolute  has  been  brought  about.  The  con- 
science is  still  regarded  as  innate  by  conservative 
thinkers  who  accept  the  sense  of  right  and  wrong 
as  directly  God-given ;  but  in  the  Spencerian  view 
it  is  explained  as  a  matter  of  racial  experience, 
utilitarian  in  its  origin.  Latter-day  psychology 
inclines  to  this  theory ;  and,  as  a  result,  it  may  be 
found  working  in  the  philosophy  of  literature 
and  of  aesthetics.  This  thought  tendency  when 
transferred  to  literary  criticism  irresistibly  leads 
towards  a  more  personal  and  less  hide-bound  inter- 
pretation of  the  phenomena  of  literature. 

But  this  much  may  be  said  with  certitude :  The 
individual  sense  of  moral  right  and  wrong  may  be 
subject  to  a  long  historical  evolution  and  may, 
during  that  process,  show  constantly  higher  ideals ; 
yet,  whatever  the  ideal — ^grotesque,  incomplete, 
immoral  at  a  given  time  and  place — once  accepted, 
moral  health  depends  upon  eschewing  what  is 
deemed  wrong  and  cleaving  to  what  is  deemed 
right.  So  in  literary  art,  the  aesthetic  sense  and 
the  laws  thereto  conforming  demand  that  the 
artist  obey  an  ideal  of  the  beautiful.  Disobey  it, 
and  the  art  product  becomes  unaesthetic,  lying  be- 
yond the  province  of  art.  This  aesthetic  ideal  may, 
however,  shift  or  vary  according  to  racial  differ- 
ences and  those  of  time.  Yes,  it  may  even  differ 
(within  limits)  in  the  case  of  two  cultured  per- 
sons of  the  same  race,  place  and  day.  But  the 
concurrent  critical  opinion  of  the  human  intelli- 
gence directed  upon  the  materials  of  literature 


148  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

does  insist  upon  some  ideal,  and  in  all  periods 
and  lands  bases  appreciation  of  the  artistic  prod- 
uct upon  the  sense  of  pleasure.  What  pleases — 
using  pleasure  in  the  broad  sense  to  include  that 
which  emotionally  arouses — ^is  within  the  pale, 
what  is  not  pleasing  lies  without.  It  is  not  enough 
that  a  person  be  pleased — the  individual  artist  or 
amateur;  there  must  be  wide  agreement  in  order 
that  the  variables  incidental  to  the  personal  equa- 
tion be  eliminated  as  far  as  possible.  Subtracting 
all  discrepancies  and  variances  of  ideal,  a  residuum 
is  left  which  declares  for  the  ever  clarifying  per- 
sistence of  the  beauty-sense.  So  much  may  with 
modesty,  in  the  light  of  present  psychology,  be 
claimed  for  judgments  upon  literary  art.  And 
this  position  should  be  taken  sturdily  against  those 
who  would  upset  all  canons  and  plead  for  the  un- 
licensed expression  of  personality.  A  technique  of 
the  art — ^however  it  may  have  changed  with  the 
change  of  ideal — ^has  always  and  must  always 
exist. 

But  to  go  further  and  argue  for  changeless  laws 
entirely  outside  the  human  mind  which  makes  and 
accepts  them,  is  dangerous. 

Modern  criticism,  then,  is  aware  of  this  general 
change  of  front  towards  canons  hitherto  held  to 
be  absolute  and  invariable ;  and  its  increased  sub- 
jectivity, with  the  substitution  of  the  personal  im- 
pression for  the  historical  laws,  is  more  than  in- 
dividual whim,  being  in  accord  with  a  widespread 
and  typical  intellectual  process.    It  is  not  wise. 


A  NOTE   ON  MODERN   CRITICISM       149 

therefore,  to  regard  this  subjective  tendency  of 
criticism  as  egoistic  in  a  bad  sense.  In  its  genesis, 
at  bottom,  such  a  habit  is  an  instinct  toward  hon- 
esty. In  the  hands  of  the  right  sort  of  man  the 
results  of  this  manner  of  literary  appreciation  are 
both  illuminating  and  stimulating.  The  reader 
catches  the  contagion  of  enthusiasm  and  receives 
a  liberating  sense  of  his  own  right  to  first-hand 
enjoyment.  He  makes  bold  to  like  a  given  piece 
of  literature  not  because  he  must,  but  because  it 
appeals  to  him,  and  here  beginneth  all  truthful 
enjoyment  in  letters. 


LITEKATURE   AS   CRAFT 


The  Love  of  the  Fine  Phrase 

The  whole  accomplishment,  the  whole  desire 
of  literature,  may  be  resolved  into  the  love  for 
the  fine  phrase.  Alfred  de  Musset  once  confessed, 
half-shamefacedly,  his  deep  joy  in  phrasing;  and 
always  to  the  true  maker  in  letters  what  is  of 
supreme  importance  is  the  way  one  says  things. 
To  lavish  infinite  pains  upon  the  manner  of  one's 
work  is  to  be  of  the  elect.  We  call  Frenchmen 
like  Flaubert  and  the  De  Goncourts  men-of -letters, 
par  excellence,  just  because  this  was  with  them  a 
consuming  ambition, — to  seek  the  fittest,  finest, 
most  impeccable  expression.  More  than  is  perhaps 
realized,  the  fine  phrase  makes  the  difference  be- 
tween platitude  and 'the  play  of  genius.  Lowell 
has  discoursed  wisely  of  this,  pointing  out  that 
what  seems  a  striking  thought  becomes,  on  analy- 
sis, a  striking  medium  for  the  conveyance  of  a 
thought  which,  less  richly,  less  graciously,  less 
boldly  dressed,  would  be  catalogued  as  a  common- 
place. Times  innumerable,  matter  and  manner 
are  thus  confused. 

The  usual  sneer  at  this  love  for  the  fine  phrase 
imputes  shallowness  and  a  worship  of  the  aesthetic 

150 


LITERATURE   AS    CRAFT  151 

divorced  from  the  intellectual  and  the  ethical. 
The  imputation  is  unfair  and  may,  by  a  return 
thrust,  itself  be  called  shallow.  For  the  fine  phrase 
implies  the  fine  personality  behind  it :  an  individ- 
uality of  interest,  a  happy  gift,  a  force  not  of 
earth's  predicable  creatures.  Literary  style,  while 
it  may  be  striven  for  and  though  it  waits  on  wor- 
shipful toil,  cannot  be  commanded ;  its  will  is  the 
wind's  will,  after  all.  "When  style  revisits  me,^^ 
writes  Eobert  Louis  Stevenson,  in  those  precious 
"Vailima  Letters,"'  and  he  said  it  all  in  four 
words.  A  craftsman  he  was,  if  ever  one  wielded 
English  speech;  but  he  knew  that  diction  would 
come  with  inspiration,  not  before.  With  all  his 
cunning,  he  was  not  its  master;  style  was  his 
mistress,  to  be  wooed  and  won,  an  eternal  femi- 
nine. In  the  physical  world  motion  generates 
heat  and  light;  in  the  psychical  world  heat  and 
light  are  generated  by  emotion.  And  heat  and 
light  are  the  wings  of  style. 

It  may  seem  to  some  a  poor  quest,  this  of  the 
fine  phrase.  The  communication  of  ideas  being 
the  most  obvious  mission  of  language,  is  there  not 
something  puerile,  even  piddling,  in  an  aspiration 
for  the  right  marshalling  of  words  ?  Can  this  be 
a  valid  life-work  for  grown  men  and  women? 
Verily,  yes.  For  to  make  fine  phrases  is  to  create 
beauty ;  and  to  create  beauty  is  to  have  commerce 
with  the  Eternal, — ^mortality's  highest  privilege. 
Then,  too,  fine  phrases  inevitably  are  associated 
with  fine  ideas — those  apian  miracles  which  at  the 


152  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

chance  clangor  of  a  word  swarm  in  the  brain-hive 
and  deposit  their  amber  sweets  for  the  writer's 
behoof — and  for  posterity's. 

Moreover,  the  power  of  the  fine  phrase  is  greater 
among  men  than  they  are  aware,  the  fascination 
of  style  likely  to  be  belittled.  Even  the  Philistine, 
who  would  be  first  to  pooh-pooh  our  glorification 
of  diction,  is  moved,  albeit  unaware,  by  the  apt 
turn,  the  smooth  flow  of  the  sentence,  the  sudden 
flash  of  metaphor,  the  musical  cadence,  the  start- 
ling felicity  of  antithesis.  He  is  subtly  pleased, 
he  reads  on  and  on,  and  thinks,  good  easy  man,  it 
is  little  to  do,  that  he  is  most  concerned  with 
mind-stuff.  Ah,  the  agonies,  the  long  trying,  the 
failures  innumerous,  the  despaired-of  perfections 
that  are  back  of  and  under  that  easy  accomplish- 
ment. Mayhap  our  Philistine  deems  pleasure  but 
a  trifling  thing  to  strive  for,  and  hence  puts  the 
pleasuremaker  on  a  par  with  the  mountebank. 
Yet  let  him  be  honest  with  himself,  and  he  shall 
find  that  pleasure — ^joy,  happiness,  the  name  mat- 
ters not — is  life's  one  conceivable  guerdon,  the 
only  key  to  the  mystery  of  mortality.  To  give 
pleasure  to  the  knowing  few  is  to  be  an  artist, 
and  the  fine  phrase  is  one  of  the  legitimate  artistic 
methods  of  pleasure-giving.  Since  all  men,  ac- 
cording to  their  light  and  degree  of  culture,  are 
a-search  for  pleasure,  and  many  find  it  in  that  fit 
and  beautiful  expression  of  personality  which  we 
call  style  in  literature,  the  function  of  the  fine 
phrase  is  justified ;  for  it  is  seen  to  take  its  place 


LITERATURE   A8    CRAFT  153 

in  the  economy  of  nature,  meeting  a  real  demand. 
To  the  serious  artist  in  words,  it  is  little  less  than 
a  religion,  this  cult  of  the  fine  phrase.  Here  he 
will  not  sin,  whatever  he  do  in  his  daily  walks. 
This  temple  he  will  not  profane,  the  spirit  that 
presides  over  it  being  august,  lovely,  without  stain. 
Such  a  place  is  meet,  he  must  fain  feel,  for  his 
choicest  sacrifices. 

II 

What  is  Literary  Merit? 

The  things  which  in  a  deep  sense  we  know  and 
understand  best  are  hardest  to  define.  Love  is 
the  greatest  motor-power  on  the  earth,  the  com- 
mon experience  and  the  common  glory  of  man- 
kind. Yet  who  dares  define  it,  to  set  a  mete  and 
a  bound  for  humanity's  master-passion?  It  is 
somewhat  thus  with  such  an  intangible  quality  or 
characteristic  as  excellence  in  letters;  we  appre- 
hend it  readily  enough,  we  mourn  its  absence,  we 
thrill  under  a  consciousness  of  its  charm,  but  we 
are  dazed  a  little  at  first  when  the  question  is  put, 
plump  and  direct:  What,  then,  is  literary  merit? 

To  come  boldly  at  the  difficulty,  literary  merit 
is  that  quality  in  writing  which  relates,  not  to 
the  things  said,  but  to  the  manner  of  saying 
things.  It  is,  strictly  speaking,  a  matter  of  form, 
and  nothing  else. 

Emerson  is  literature,  not  because  he  is  a  great 
thinker  in  ethics  or  philosophy,  but  because  he 


164  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

utters  his  thoughts  in  a  certain  beautiful  and  in- 
communicable fashion.  The  Bible,  entirely  apart 
from  its  value  as  a  religious  teacher,  is  a  wonder- 
ful literary  repository,  simply  because  a  set  of 
men  back  in  the  early  seventeenth  century,  when 
the  diction  of  Marlowe  and  of  Shakspere,  of  Ben 
Jonson  and  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  was  in  the 
air,  were  inspired  to  put  its  proverbs,  its  parables 
and  its  psalms  into  such  language  as  has  never  been 
equaled  in  English  before  or  since.  If  this  defini- 
tion be  correct,  it  becomes  evident  that  books  lying 
outside  of  what  is  called  belles-lettres  may  have 
literary  merit.  When  one  who  has  a  genius  for 
expression  writes,  for  example,  upon  science,  he 
still  makes  literature ;  as  witness  a  Humboldt  or  a 
Huxley.  Whenever  or  wherever  a  man  sets  down 
his  thoughts  in  a  way  which  attracts,  moves  and 
charms  by  its  style,  or  its  manner  of  saying 
things,  that  man  has  literary  merit,  and  no  man 
else  can  be  said  to  possess  it. 

Some  may  perhaps  incline  to  take  offense  at  this 
simple  explanation  of  literary  excellence.  ^'What,^^ 
they  will  cry,  "the  great  effects  of  literature,  the 
brilliancy  and  beauty,  the  wit  and  pathos,  which 
have  so  often  held  us  thrall,  all  this  to  be  resolved 
into  a  trick  of  the  trade,  a  legerdemain  of  rhe- 
toric?" 

The  answer  to  such  an  outbreak  is  not  far  to 
seek.  Expression,  at  its  best  and  in  its  normal 
function,  is  not  a  self-conscious  act  in  which  the 
writer  stands  off  and  strives  to  produce  an  im- 


LITERATURE   AS   CRAFT  165 

pression,  but  iS;,  rather^  in  some  degree,  a  revela- 
tion; so  that  each  man  who  makes  literature  gives 
the  world;,  in  his  writings,  a  sort  of  simulacrum  of 
his  own  personality,  of  that  essence  which  is  he, 
as  against  every  other  personality  in  existence. 
Nay,  it  is  more  than  a  simulacrum,  for  the  whole 
creature  is  in  it,  brain  and  body,  heart  and  soul. 
From  his  manner  of  saying  things  you  gather  an 
idea  of  what  manner  of  man  he  is;  not  so  much 
what  he  is  in  actual,  every-day  life  as  what  he  is 
potentially,  in  his  possibilities,  according  as  God 
made  him. 

But  in  setting  up  this  definition  of  literary 
merit,  it  may  still  be  objected  that  no  true  touch- 
stone has  been  given  to  guide  one  in  pronouncing 
for  or  against  a  man's  claim  to  write  literature. 
Granted  that  the  manner  of  saying  things  is  the 
test,  how  may  this  manner  be  distinguished  ?  what 
are  its  earmarks?  the  elements  or  characteristics 
which  go  to  make  it  ?  Perhaps  the  most  common 
reply  to  this  highly  pertinent  question  is  to  cata- 
logue, as  do  the  rhetoricians,  those  qualities  which 
are  admirable  in  and  essential  to  good  writing: 
as  simplicity,  fitness  and  beauty,  perspicuity,  force 
and  elegance,  and  so  forth.  But  the  trouble  here 
is,  that  opinions  are  apt  to  differ  as  to  what  is 
beauty,  or  elegance,  or  force. 

Perspicuity,  clearness,  common  folk  might  agree 
pretty  well  on;  but  when  we  come  to  the  other 
qualities,  there  is  sure  to  be  confusion  worse  con- 
founded.   When  a  stump  orator  out  West  told  a 


156  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

friend  of  mine  that  he  had  read  Bunyan's  ^Til- 
grim's  Progress"  and  found  it  interesting,  but  that 
it  had  no  literary  merit,  he  showed  that  his  sense 
of  the  qualities  that  go  to  the  making  of  such 
merit  was  erratic,  half-developed. 

A  housemaid  the  other  day  informed  me  that 
a  missing  article  was  in  ^^the  nurse's  apartment." 
ISTow,  the  place  she  referred  to  was  a  small,  plainly 
furnished  room  of  perhaps  ten  by  twelve  feet. 
To  call  it  ^^an  apartment"  was  absurd,  because 
that  word  gave  a  false  idea  of  its  fitting-up  and  of 
its  size.  The  word  ^^room"  would  have  been  bet- 
ter, because  fitter  and  simpler;  moreover,  because 
it  is  a  native  Saxon  word  and  hence  preferable  to 
the  Eomance  word,  *^^apartment,"  which  is  used  un- 
necessarily and  wrongly  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten. 

These  examples  serve  to  illustrate  my  point, 
which  is,  that  it  is  insufficient  and  dangerous  to 
insist  on  a  certain  number  of  qualities  as  con- 
stituting the  literary  manner  of  saying  things. 
Such  categories  are  of  avail  in  giving  students  a 
notion  of  what  is  to  be  aimed  at  in  writing;  but 
they  are  not  satisfactory  in  defining  what  is  style 
— ^that  subtle  and  wonderful  thing.  That  an  ob- 
servance of  the  laws  of  grammar  is  at  the  basis  of 
style  hardly  needs  the  saying;  such  observance 
leads  to  correct  writing,  but  not  necessarily  to  the 
producing  of  literature,  any  more  than  the  founda- 
tion walls  of  a  building  settle  the  question  of  its 
subsequent  architectural  ugliness  or  beauty.  I 
would  choose  a  more  subjective  test  than  that  of 


LITERATURE   A8    CRAFT  157 

the  rhetorics,  and  would  affirm  that  a  perception 
of  the  manner  of  saying  things  which  constitutes 
literary  merit  can  only  be  reached  by  a  constant 
and  catholic  reading  of  the  best  literature. 

By  heredity  one  can  have  almost  an  intuition 
of  what  is  good,  so  that  the  life's  reading  is  begun 
with  a  great  advantage  over  another  who  has  no 
bookish  ancestry ;  -but  even  the  latter  can  acquire 
this  sixth  sense  by  dint  of  wise  and  multifarious 
contact  with  books.  The  stump  orator  could  not 
see  the  beauty  of  Bunyan  simply  for  the  reason 
that  he  had  not  got  into  his  blood  the  rhythm  of 
fine  prose,  nor  a  feeling  for  the  virile  strength  of 
Saxon  methods  of  expression.  My  maid  thought 
"apartment"  more  high-sounding  and  aristocratic 
than  "room,"  because  she  had  not  read  enough 
and  heard  enough  good  speech  to  learn  the  great 
lesson  that  in  both  written  and  spoken  words, 
other  things  being  equal,  the  simplest  is  always 
the  best. 

By  constant  and  intelligent  communion  with 
the  master  spirits  of  English  letters,  and  then,  if 
possible,  with  those  of  foreign  literature,  the  reader 
comes  to  recognize  intuitively  and  with  perfect 
ease  the  distinction  and  charm  of  manner  which 
make  literature.  He  learns,  too,  that  the  manner 
itself  may  vary  almost  as  often  as  do  the  men 
who  speak;  that  Addison  and  Carlyle  both  write 
literature,  yet  are  at  the  antipodes  of  style;  that 
the  glory  of  Walt  Whitman  is  one  and  the  glory 
of  Tennyson  is  another.    Yet  will  he  discover  that 


168  FORGES   IN  FICTION 

all  have  somewhat  in  common,  though  with  infi- 
nite variations  and  manifold  divergencies ;  that  all 
possess  a  common  gift  and  a  common  distinction 
which  lead  us  to  declare  them  makers  of  literature 
and  masters  of  the  mighty  art  of  letters. 

Coming  back,  then,  to  our  starting  point,  liter- 
ary merit  lies  in  the  manner  of  saying  things. 
Original  thought,  noble  conception,  poetic  imag- 
ining, these  are  precious ;  but  unless  they  be  poured 
into  the  transmuting  mold  of  expression  they  are 
not  of  themselves  enough  to  constitute  literature. 
And  the  way  to  gain  the  power  of  knowing  this 
great  gift  of  expression  is  for  the  reader  to  ac- 
quaint himself  or  herself  with  the  books  pro- 
nounced by  the  calm,  sure  judgment  of  the  cen- 
turies to  be  the  best  and  most  worthy  to  live — 
books  that  possess  what  Austin  Dobson  has  called 
^^Time's  great  antiseptic,  style."  And  in  the  case 
of  the  writer,  this  same  reading  should  be  supple- 
mented by  a  steady,  unwearying  use  of  the  pen, 
since  only  thus  will  it  gradually  acquire  a  power 
mightier  than  the  sword,  even  as  persuasion  is 
mightier  than  violence  and  the  shaping  of  souls 
more  than  the  mutilation  of  the  body. 

Ill 

Music  and  Emotion-  in  Poetry 

Alliteration,  or  the  rhyming  of  initial  letters,  is 
a  device  which,  used  either  in  prose  or  poetry,  is 
likely  to  be  despised  and  misunderstood  by  those 


LITERATURE   AS    CRAFT  159 

who  incline  to  snap-judgments.  This  is  due  in 
part  to  ignorance,  in  part  to  the  patent  abuse  of 
alliteration,  as  seen,  for  example,  in  the  head- 
lines of  sensational  journalism,  or,  if  literature 
be  in  evidence,  in  the  verse  of  such  a  man  as  Swin- 
burne, whose  alliterative  tours  de  force  are  alone 
in  modern  poetry  for  self-consciousness  and  per- 
sistency. But  the  fact  is — and  it  is  well  to  em- 
phasize and  illustrate  it — that  alliteration  is  a 
thing  of  historical  dignity  in  English  verse  (and 
English  prose  as  well),  and  is,  moreover,  in  es- 
sence and  primarily  a  psychic  phenomenon. 

Let  me  show  what  is  meant,  first,  as  to  the  his- 
tory of  this  characteristic  of  the  technique  of  po- 
etry, confining  the  discussion  to  verse,  as  the  form 
of  literature  wherein  alliteration  is  most  plainly 
to  be  seen  in  its  workings.  As  is  well  known  to 
students  of  English  verse,  alliteration  precedes 
rh3rine  in  the  historical  development  of  our  native 
poetry.  Rhyme  (which  is  the  sound-agreement  of 
words  at  the  end  of  a  line  in  contradistinction 
from  the  initial-letter  rhyming  which  we  call  allit- 
eration) came  into  English  from  the  medieval 
Latin  hymns  through  the  French,  and  we  do  not 
find  it  used  till  long  after  the  Norman  Conquest. 
But  for  centuries  before  this,  poetry  was  culti- 
vated as  an  art,  and  had  its  definite,  artistic  laws 
and  formularies ;  and  the  particular  device  which 
was  the  predecessor  of  rhyme  as  a  means  of  music- 
making  (which  is,  as  we  shall  see  in  a  moment, 
the  object  both  of  rhyme  and  alliteration)  is  allit- 


160  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

eration.  Let  me  illustrate  from  a  famous  Anglo- 
Saxon  poem,  the  epic  of  "Beowulf/'  our  first  great 
Jlnglish  epic.  The  following  is  a  typical  line  from 
the  poem: 

"Oft  Scyld  Sceflng  Sceathena  threatum"— 
Often  Scyld,  son  of  Scef,  with  troops  of  warriors — . 

Here,  be  it  observed,  we  find  three  alliterative 
words,  and,  noting  the  literal  translation  placed 
under  the  line,  we  see  that  those  words  are  im- 
portant noun-words.  Now,  without  going  into 
the  minutiae  of  the  matter,  it  is  sufficient  to  say 
that  the  normal  Anglo-Saxon  line  of  poetry  is 
built  in  this  way,  showing  two  alliterations  in  the 
first  half  of  the  verse  and  one  at  least  in  the  sec- 
ond half,  and  that  the  accents  fall  on  the  alliter- 
ative word,  which  is  necessarily  an  important  one 
in  both  grammar  and  meaning.  There  are  sub- 
divisions and  finesses  of  this  main  law,  such  as  to 
make  the  construction  of  old  English  verse  a 
highly  wrought  and  intricate  affair.  And  yet  here 
is  a  poem  whence  the  illustration  is  drawn,  writ- 
ten presumably  in  the  seventh  or  eighth  century, 
hundreds  of  years  before  rhyme,  as  now  under- 
stood, was  dreamed  of  in  English.  How  foolish 
and  ignorant,  in  the  face  of  such  data,  to  speak 
of  the  earliest  English  poetry,  and  of  art  in  this 
field,  as  rough  and  inartistic !  Nevertheless  so  it 
is  treated  in  the  majority  of  manuals  on  English 
literature. 

In  a  word,  then,  alliteration,  instead  of  be- 


LITERATURE   AS    CRAFT  161 

ing  a  more  or  less  flimsy  trick  of  the  trade  in 
poetry,  is  an  art-law  which  reigned  supreme  for 
centuries  in  our  older  and  noble  poetic  products, 
and  which,  moreover,  I  want  to  show  is  still  a 
legitimate  and  even  necessary  device  and  aid  to 
expression  when  rightly  used.  All  the  best  mod- 
ern verse  proves  this,  and  I  shall  try  to  make  this 
plain  under  my  second  thesis,  namely,  that  alliter- 
ation is  a  psychic  phenomenon,  and  hence  is  an 
inevitable  accompaniment  to  true  and  inspired 
poetry. 

For  consider  for  a  moment  that  both  rhyme  and 
alliteration,  as  hinted  above,  are  means  of  secur- 
ing music  in  the  poem;  this  is  their  sole  raison 
d'itre.  Rhyme,  by  the  consonance  of  vowels  and 
consonants,  and  by  more  definitely  marking  the 
rhythm  of  the  verse,  adds  to  the  musicalness  there- 
of; and  alliteration,  by  the  repetition  of  identical 
letters  rhythmically  distributed  in  a  line,  produces 
likewise  an  effect  of  music  and  a  desirable  tone- 
color,  less  full  and  rich,  however,  than  rhyme,  but 
nevertheless  a  musical  effect.  IN'ow  the  next  thing 
to  notice  is  the  interesting  and  perfectly  demon- 
strable dictum  that  in  poetry  there  is  a  direct  rela- 
tion between  emotion  and  music;  that  is,  a  poet 
makes  music  in  so  far  as  he  is  emotionally  vibrant- 
and  alive.  But  if  alliteration  be  one  way  of  gain- 
ing an  effect  of  music,  it  follows  logically  that  the 
singer  emotionally  creative  will  instinctively  and 
of  necessity  make  use  of  alliteration  as  one  means 
of  securing  the  desired  result. 


162  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

This  explains  what  I  mean  in  stating  that  allit- 
eration is  a  psychic  phenomenon ;  it  is  an  outward 
and  visible  token  of  an  inward  (siibjective)  and 
poetic  state  or  condition  on  the  part  of  the  bard. 
If  we  accept  this  definition — and  it  seems  to  be  a 
sound  and  philosophical  one — we  are  in  a  posi- 
tion at  once  to  understand  the  true  function  of 
this  so  often  disesteemed  characteristic  of  formal 
poetry,  and,  with  this  touchstone,  to  pronounce 
on  what  is  good  or  bad  in  alliteration.  Allitera- 
tion is,  then,  a  mark  of  emotion,  and  its  effect  is 
to  add  music  to  the  poet's  work.  If  a  spurt  of 
lyric  feeling  tends  to  alliterative  language  this 
should  be  apparent  in  both  prose  and  poetry.  As 
a  matter  of  fact  it  is  apparent;  and,  confining 
myself  still  to  verse,  I  will  give  an  example  or 
two. 

Once  on  a  time  Walter  Savage  Landor  wrote 
a  splendid  piece  of  blank  verse  to  Eobert  Brown- 
ing, beginning: 

"Shakespeare  la  not  our  poet,  but  the  world's. 
Therefore  of  him,  no  speech/* 

And  the  praise  herein  tendered  by  the  golden- 
tongued  classicist  to  the  chief  dramatic  singer  of 
our  century,  culminates  with  a  marked  sibilant 
■alliteration  in  the  lines: 

"Beyond  Sorrento  and  Amalfi,  where 
The  siren  waits  thee,  singing-  song  for  song." 

The  artistic  climax  calls  for  and  produces  an 
alliterative  richness  lacking,  and  rightly  lacking. 


LITERATURE   A8    CRAFT  163 

in  the  preceding  lines.  Hence,  this  is  an  example 
of  what  may  be  called  legitimate,  organic  allitera- 
tion; by  which  is  meant,  alliteration  correspond- 
ing with  the  march  and  culmination  of  the  poem. 
In  the  snperb  little  lyric,  "Home  Thoughts  from 
Abroad,"  the  bard  here  apostrophized  by  Landor 
furnishes  another  example: 

*'And  after  April,  when  May  follows, 
And  the  whitethroat  builds,  and  all  the  swallows! 
Hark,  where  my  blossomed  pear-tree  in  the  hedge 
Leans  to  the  field  and  scatters  on  the  clover 
Blossoms  and  dewdrops— at  the  bent  spray's  edge— 
That's  the  wise  thrush;    he  sings  each  song  twice  over, 
Lest  you  should  think  he  never  could  recapture 
The  first  fine  careless  rapture!" 

And  in  those  two  closing  lines  notice  the  double 
alliteration  on  /  and  c,  so  distributed  as  to  pro- 
duce the  finest  effect.  The  climax,  which  is  more 
emotional  than  in  Lander's  blank  verse,  is  an 
impulsive  leap  of  creative  expression  and  lo !  allit- 
eration comes  to  enrich  the  language  use  and 
deepen  the  music.  It  is  not  "alliteration's  artful 
aid"  here,  but  something  far  more  natural  and 
significant.  Indeed,  that  line,  "alliteration's  art- 
ful aid,"  has  done  harm  no  end  in  spreading  this 
misconception  that  alliteration  is  always  a  self- 
conscious  and  technical  affair,  never  psychic,  per- 
sonal and  spontaneous.  It  is  worth  noting  that 
the  four  additional  lines  in  this  poem  of  Brown- 
ing's have  almost  an  effect  of  anticlimax,  after  the 
splendid  alliterative  and  emotional  crest  of  feeling 
in  the  passage  just  quoted. 


164  FORGES   IN  FICTION 

Examples  might  be  multiplied  indefinitely,  for 
all  literature  is  full  of  them.  The  principle  which 
is  evolved  from  such  modern  instances  seems  to  be 
that  the  right  kind  of  alliteration  comes  in  spurts 
correspondent  to  emotive  impulses,  and  will  be, 
consequently,  irregular  and  not  regular  in  occur- 
rence. This  is  the  reason  why  the  alliteration  of 
Swinburne  strikes  a  false  note  so  often  and  be- 
comes offensive  at  times.  That  great  poet  makes 
use  of  the  device  almost  as  systematically  as  did 
the  Anglo-Saxon  gleemen,  with  whom,  as  was 
shown,  it  was  a  definite,  artistic  law  of  poetics. 
In  other  words,  alliteration  with  Swinburne  is  not 
inevitably  conjoined  with  lyric  intensity,  but  is 
used  coldly,  self-consciously.  Hence,  a  sense  in 
the  reader  that  it  is  artificial.  It  ceases  to  have 
dynamic,  psychic  significancy,  and  becomes  a 
purely  formal  and  sensuous  enrichment  or  orna- 
mentation of  the  verse.  Let  me  give  a  single  il- 
lustration. In  "Anactoria,^'  a  certain  passage  ends 
with  the  line, 

"Memories  shall  mix  and  metaphors  of  me." 

Here  it  hardly  needs  saying  that  both  thought 
and  phraseology  preclude  the  possibility  of  an 
emotional  state ;  yet  the  m  alliteration  is  excessive. 
Thousands  of  examples  of  this  tendency  in  the 
author  of  "Laus  Veneris"  could  be  cited.  I  do  not 
for  a  moment  mean  to  say  that  plenty  of  Swin- 
burne's poems  might  not  be  mentioned  in  which 
a  masterful  handling  of  alliteration  is  linked  with 


LITERATURE   AS    CRAFT  165' 

the  most  fervent  feeling  and  an  irresistibly  song- 
ful lilt.  But,  speaking  by  and  large,  an  effect  of 
artificiality  is  indubitably  made  by  Swinburne's 
technique  in  this  particular,  and  he  offers  the  most 
striking  modern  instance  of  the  abuse  of  one  of 
the  oldest  art  laws  in  English  poetry,  and  deserves 
careful  study  with  this  single  characteristic  in 
mind. 

^^Yes,''  objects  the  critic,  ^^ut  why  is  it  worse 
for  Swinburne  to  use  alliteration  thus  consciously 
and  steadily  than  for  the  Anglo-Saxons  to  do  so, 
as  you  have  confessed  they  did?"  The  answer  is 
that  to  the  Old  English  bard  this  method  of  music- 
making  was  what  rhyme  is  now  in  English  verse ; 
but  Swinburne,  in  addition  to  a  lavish  and  won- 
derful use  of  rh3rme  music,  superadds  this  music 
of  alliteration,  and  the  result  is  a  cloying  rich- 
ness, an  over-lusciousness  which  is  often  dwelt 
upon  in  any  analysis  of  his  work. 

A  man  who  has  Swinburne's  intense  love  of  his 
art  and  a  supreme  gift  for  music  in  verse,  and 
whose  handling  of  alliteration  is  marked  yet 
sharply  divergent  from  the  English  poet's  inas- 
much as  it  is  natural  and  correspondent  to  emo- 
tion, not  artificial  and  formal,  is  Sidney  Lanier. 
The  flush  and  fire  of  much  of  his  lyric  work  is 
brought  about,  among  other  things,  by  his  allitera- 
tive prodigality.  But  a  study  of  him  will  reveal 
the  distinction  made  between  him  and  a  Swin- 
burne in  this  regard.  Take  his  perfect  song  'The 
Dove"  and  let  us  look  at  the  closing  stanza : 


166  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

"Nay,  if  ye  three,  O  Morn!    O  Spring!    O  Heart! 
Should  chant  grave  unisons  of  grief  and  love. 
Ye  could  not  mourn  with  more  melodious  art 

Than  daily  doth  yon  dim  sequestered  dove." 

Here  there  is  a  strong  alliterative  effect,  secured 
by  the  m  and  d  rh3rm.es  of  the  two  verses  that 
bring  the  lyric  to  a  close.  Here,  also,  is  a  dis- 
tinct rhetorical  and  lyrical  climax  of  a  subtly 
quiet  but  strong  and  lovely  sort.  This  may  be 
realized  by  any  one  who  reads  the  three  preceding 
stanzas  which  lead  up  to  the  comparison  whose 
quintessence  is  expressed  in  these  closing  lines. 
Therefore,  this  is  a  classic  example  of  fit  and  spon- 
taneous alliteration.  The  one  law  of  right  use  is, 
as  Lanier  himself  has  said,  that  the  poet  be  hon- 
est; by  which  he  meant  that  he  be  not  self-con- 
scious, nor  his  linguistics  and  metrics  studied  at 
the  moment  of  composition.  Sidney  Lanier  is 
alliterative  to  an  extent  without  parallel  among 
American  poets  (unless  Poe  be  excepted),  but  only 
because  his  genius  was  intensely  lyrical  and  he 
was  a  natural  music-maker.  Swinburne,  contrari- 
wise, while  also  a  true  and  exquisite  lyrist,  has 
made  the  mistake  of  riding  alliteration  to  death, 
forcing  it  to  become  a  set,  formal  law  in  his  work ; 
and  so  we  hear,  too  often,  the  creak  of  the  ma- 
chinery coming  in  to  disturb  the  God-given  melody 
of  his  song. 

Our  study  of  alliteration  then,  even  thus  in 
brief,  leads  to  a  very  decided  opinion  and  to  firm 
ground  of  theory.  It  is,  we  see,  a  thing  of  legit- 
imacy and  of  great  importance  in  the  develop- 


LITERATURE   AS    CRAFT  167. 

ment  of  English  poetry — ^indeed,  of  all  poetry.  It 
is  not  a  pretty  verbal  trick  to  tickle  our  ears 
withal,  but,  rather,  is  inwrought  with  the  being  of 
man  when  he  is  creatively  inspired  to  literary  pro^ 
duction.  It  is,  to  be  sure,  capable  of  abuse,  as  is 
well  exemplified  in  the  case  of  Swinburne;  but, 
in  its  purity  and  right  use,  it  constitutes  one  of 
the  chief  beauties  of  the  technique  of  poetry.  Ex- 
actly the  same  line  of  argument  can  be  applied  to 
prose,  and  illustrations  are  legion  from  our  best 
prose  writers.  It  can  also  be  shown  that  allitera- 
tion in  maxims  and  proverbs  has  both  a  mnemonic 
and  an  artistic  function.  But  this  is  a  subject  by 
itself.  In  our  mighty  prose  authors  it  will  be 
found  that  their  places  and  periods  of  rhetorical 
climax  and  creative  splendor  are  rich  with  alliter- 
ation at  its  finest  and  freest. 

However,  the  discussion  has  here  been  limited 
to  verse,  and  I  repeat  as  a  summary :  Alliteration 
in  any  serious  study  of  English  poetry  must  be  re- 
garded as  a  mark  of  emotion,  a  psychic  phenom- 
enon, having  definite  and  close  relations  to  the 
spirit  of  the  man  who  seizes  on  it  instinctively  as 
an  aid  to  and  ornament  of  expression. 


INDOOES  AND  OUT:  TWO  REVERIES 

I 

Before  the  Fiee 

What  a  walk  is  in  the  early  spring  woods,  with 
its  chance  of  finding  the  trailing  arbutus  shy-hid 
beneath  the  dead  brown  leaves  or  of  thrilling 
again  at  the  sight  of  the  stainless  white  bloom  of 
the  bloodroot,  such  to  midwinter  is  the  indoor 
open  fire  on  the  hearth.  Twin  delights  these, 
each  after  its  kind,  growing  with  the  years  and 
fuller  associations. 

To-day,  returning  from  the  city,  I  note  the 
bleakness  of  the  western  sky  and  hear  in  the  inter- 
mittent wind-gust  a  doleful  presage  of  storm  and 
a  shut-in  frozen  world  on  the  morrow.  But  my 
thoughts  outfly  me  homeward,  and  I  pluck  up 
heart  at  the  image  that  is  evoked  of  a  cheery  blaze 
and  a  backlog  that  gravely  drones  a  soothing  bass 
to  the  vibrant,  nervous  treble  of  the  flames  aspir- 
ing, striving,  and  at  last  paling  down  to  embers 
and  eventual  ashes.  And  even  so  the  reality. 
That  mundane  matter,  dinner,  dispatched,  and 
slippers  donned,  I  am  in  front  of  the  polished 
andirons  that  twinkle  reflections  of  the  facile 
lights.  Cozy  in  my  big  Sleepy-Hollow  armchair, 
I  can  listen  in  a  very  unction  of  creature  comfort 

168 


INDOORS   AND    OUT  169 

to  the  somber  wail  or  leonine  roar  of  the  wind  out- 
side,, enjoying  vicariously  for  all  less  lucky 
mortals. 

What  a  long,  weary  journey  has  civilized  man 
taken  since  the  first  fire  of  like  kind  was  lighted 
for  enheartenment  against  darkness,  cold,  hunger, 
loneliness !  And  yet,  with  the  vast  deal  that  has 
been  learned  and  sloughed  oS  and  forgotten,  back 
he  comes  to  this  primitive  solace  to  find  it  all- 
sufficing  and,  in  truth,  the  acme  of  nineteenth- 
century  luxury.  The  thought  has  its  reproof,  its 
warning.  But  since  the  day  our  forefathers  piled 
high  the  great  rough-hewn  branches  in  the  hall 
and  quaffed  ale  and  mead  from  curiously  chased 
cups  as  the  flames  licked  lithely  toward  the  smoke 
dark  rafters,  much  has  entered  imaginatively  in- 
to the  wood  fire  as  a  fact  in  life,  to  broaden  and 
enrich  its  content  and  suggestion.  The  literature 
of  our  own  country  has  thrown  on  many  a  stick 
to  yield  a  more  ethereal  glow.  The  wood  fire  has 
put  on  a  mystic  aspect  since  Poe  wrote  his  "Eaven" 
before  it: 

And  each  separate  dying  ember 
Wrought  its  ghost  upon  the  floor. 

Longfellow's  "Tales  of  a  Wayside  Inn''  had  never 
crept  so  warmly  into  our  affections  had  it  not 
been  the  emanation  of  the  group  about  the  back- 
log. Hawthorne,  too,  in  his  wonder-tales,  needs 
to  be  read  with  this  sibilant,  colorful  background. 
And  what  were  the  gentle  imaginings  of  Ik  Mar- 


170  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

vel,  without  a  fire  to  look  deep  into  and  to  search 
for  his  source  of  inspiration.  Nor  can  we  unseat 
Mr.  Warner  from  his  ingle  quarters,  emitting  wit 
and  wisdom  as  the  wood  emits  sparks  and  suffus- 
ing the  atmosphere  with  the  steadfast  radiance 
of  a  kindly  heart,  even  as  the  clear  blue  flame  from 
the  driftwood  lights  up  the  room,  making  it  home- 
ly and  habitable.  These  and  other  like  mages  of 
the  pen  have,  with  a  potent  species  of  wizardry, 
made  every  flame-spurtle  emblematic  and  each 
stage  in  this  conflict  of  the  elements  in  petto  a 
precious  thing  to  see  and  to  remember. 

When  the  fire  is  high  and  the  crackle  of  the 
hickory  as  merry  a  sound  as  the  gleam  thereof  is 
cheery,  playing  hide-and-seek  in  the  uttermost 
comers  of  the  study,  a  sense  of  housed  satisfac- 
tion, of  sensual  warmth  and  lazy  peace,  unite  to 
make  a  mood  of  serene  though  inexpressive  pleas- 
ure. But  as  the  logs  give  up  inchwise  their  sturdy 
length,  and  are  resolved  into  a  charred  and  broken 
semblance  of  their  sometime  selves,  the  mood 
shifts  into  reminiscence,  reverie,  and  so  shades 
imperceptibly  into  melancholy.  This  pensive 
state,  this  role  of  "II  Penseroso,^'  is  a  sort  of 
natural  outflow  of  the  precedent  stage  of  quiescent 
delight.    Wordsworth  speaks  of: 

That  sweet  mood  when  pleasant  thoughts 
Bring  sad  thoughts  to  the  mind; 

and  this  well  describes  what  goes  on  in  my  soul 
before  the  fire.     !N'ow,  see,  my  eyes  are  fathoms 


INDOORS  AND    OUT  171 

deep  in  the  glowing  coals,  ruby  red  and  scintillat- 
ing like  the  irises  of  a  snake,  while  for  a  setting 
all  around  is  the  soft,  harmonious,  dreamy  gray 
of  the  ashes.  How  at  peace  they  are  and  how 
beautiful,  after  the  brief  fury  and  festal  display 
of  the  fire !  Is  it  true,  then,  that  this  is  the  inev- 
itable issue  of  motion  and  color,  warmth  and 
fragrant  odor  and  pleasances  of  song?  In  pur- 
suance of  the  somber  thought  I  reach  out  to  the 
bookcase,  take  down  Schopenhauer  from  the  shelf, 
and  read  a  passage  wherein  the  Apostle  of  Nega- 
tion eloquently  apostrophizes  that  giving  up  of  life 
and  the  lust  of  life  which  alone,  he  deems,  offers 
a  solution  of  the  stress  and  agony  of  human 
things.  If  he  be  right,  the  quintessence  of  wis- 
dom has  been  exemplified  in  the  burning  of  these 
branches  from  the  forest  which  grows  outside  my 
window. 

They  have  had  their  moment  of  keen,  vivid  life, 
but,  lest  activity  become  torture  and  zest  satiety, 
they  have  exchanged  restlessness  for  sleep  and  an- 
nihilation. Purged  in  the  fierce  purgation  of 
flame,  theirs  is  the  stainless  lot  and  the  Nirvana 
which  is  good.  By  irresistible  analogy  the  mind 
takes  up  the  mortal  case  and  the  age-old  query, 
What  of  Life  beyond?  knocks  at  the  door  of  con- 
sciousness with  dreary  insistence.  More  often  than 
not  when  such  questions  come  we  blink  at  them, 
turning  away  with  some  ready  excuse  or  so  im- 
mersed in  the  hour's  duties  that  such-like  prob- 
lems are  put  aside  for  the  nonce,  to  be  taken  up 


172  FORCES   IN  FICTION 

at  some  pat  opportunity.  We  are  fully  aware  that 
the  riddle  for  us  is  still  unsolved ;  we  helieve  hon- 
estly that  some  day  it  will  be  proved  in  grim  earn- 
est. But  alas !  the  continual  putting  off  acts  like 
a  narcotic,  until  indifference  is  begotten  and  we 
drift  along  with  no  clear  notion  where  the  path 
ends  or  whither  it  would  lead  us.  We  have  put 
the  question  so  carefully  away  for  future  refer- 
ence, that  it  is  lost;  even  as  o'er-careful  house- 
wives, for  safe  keeping,  hide  something  delectable 
or  necessary,  belonging  to  the  male  side  of  the 
house — ^hide  it  so  successfully  that  it  is  not  forth- 
coming in  the  hour  of  necessity.     *     *     * 

The  last  red  eye  has  winked  itself  into  oblivion 
now  and,  Schopenhauer  closed  but  still  on  my 
lap,  I  still  sit  and  muse  above  the  once  ardent 
ashes.  Musing  thus,  listening  to  the  wind  moan- 
ing about  the  house  gables,  is  it  not  the  forecast 
of  old  age,  when  the  tension  shall  relax  and  the 
vision  dim,  while  slowly  the  cold  of  stagnant  blood 
creeps  upward  until  the  vital  parts  are  reached 
and  all  is  over?  The  air  of  the  room  chills,  and 
my  heart  stirs  with  a  vague  loneliness,  as  of  the 
forsaken.  But  such  gray  fancies,  true  mates  of 
the  ashes,  are  not  my  normal  way  of  meditation, 
and  finally  I  spring  up  as  the  clock  below  stairs 
strikes  twelve  with  musical  iteration.  I  build  me 
in  a  trice  another  fire  and  marking  what  a  goodly 
bed  the  former  blaze  has  left  for  its  successor, 
I  say  in  dumb  argument  with  my  critical  ego: 
^^This  has  been  no  annihilation;  here  is  substitu- 


INDOORS   AND    OUT  173 

tion,  not  destruction ;  nothing  is  lost  in  this  trans- 
lation of  the  wood;  the  phenomenal  aspect  of  the 
process  is  a  mere  eye-cheat  and,  dealt  with  by 
either  reason  or  faith,  there  is  no  cause  for  me- 
grims or  mooning."  And,  comforted  at  heart,  I 
brood  on  until  the  first  faint  twitter  of  birds  her- 
alds the  coming  of  the  hopeful  dawn  that  shall 
bring  a  new  day  of  work  and  growth  and  worship. 

II 

WheinT  the  Sap  Runs  Up  in  the  Trees 

It  seems  somewhiles,  at  the  turn  of  the  year,  as 
if  the  time  of  buds  and  birds  would  never  come. 
New  England  is  famous  for  this  hesitant  mood, 
this  chariness  in  surrendering  her  wintry  fortress 
to  the  winsome  season  for  which  man  waits  and 
yearns. 

Late  in  March  I  stand  and  look  across  the  fields 
that  lie  as  barren  and  bleak  as  ever  they  did  in 
mid  December.  The  left-over  leaves  of  yesteryear 
hang  in  straggling  bunches  and  splashes  on  beech 
boughs  and  elms,  ghostly  pale ;  you  would  say  they 
never  could  be  shaken  off  by  the  wind,  or  pushed 
aside  when  the  vital  sprouts  of  the  new  year 
prick  their  way  into  sight.  It  is  a  time  for  faith, 
hope,  and  charity.  The  air  is  raw  and  harsh; 
the  clouds  lower  gloomily,  and  as  like  as  not  a 
nor'easter  settles  down  for  several  days  on  end, 
the  fittest  thing  possible  in  this  monochrome  of 


174  FORCES  IN  FICTION 

cold  grays  and  ■iiiilustrous  browns.  After  the 
storm,  I  stroll  along  the  river  bank;  the  face  of 
nature  still  betokens  a  sombre  mood,  and  the  fields 
are  as  before,  dreary-colored,  the  trees  gaunt  skel- 
etons creaking  like  gallows  that  dangle  corpses 
in  their  air  graves  on  high.  But  of  a  sudden, 
my  eye  catches  the  hue  of  the  alders  that  grow  be- 
side the  stream,  and  my  heart  gives  a  great  thump 
of  joy;  for  lo!  the  branches  are  a  flare  of  dull, 
strange,  dusky  yellow,  a  note  of  spring,  so  in- 
definite, so  out  of  sympathy  with  the  landscape 
round  about,  as  to  make  almost  an  impression  of 
the  uncanny,  the  supernatural.  And,  next  day, 
walking  down  the  stately  avenue,  I  am  aware 
that  the  arching  boughs  of  the  soft  maples  have 
thrown  a  branched  redness  on  the  air,  signet  of  the 
sprouting  tide,  and  so  welcome  with  their  mass 
of  rich  bold  color  that  one  is  tempted  to  idleness 
beneath  their  pleached  pleasance.  And  these 
signs,  mark  you,  are  before  the  general  carnival 
of  sounds  and  sights,  when  every  fool  knows  it  is 
spring,  and  a  song  on  the  lips  is  the  meet  way  of 
praise.  As  yet,  bleakness,  gray  tints,  and  inhos- 
pitable suns. 

But  a  week  later  comes  a  change ;  a  really  bland 
day,  mild  and  soft  with  south  winds,  and  filtered 
through  and  thorough-through  with  sunshine, — 
a  miracle  to  answer  the  doubt  and  fear  bred  of 
ITature's  sphinx-like  manner  of  silence  as  to  her 
intentions.  It  is  too  good  to  be  verity,  and  I 
pinch  myself  to  make  sure  I  am  all  awake.    The- 


INDOORS  AND   OUT  175 

oretically,  I  knew  spring  would  arrive,  and  that 
once  come  she  would  be  companioned  by  beauty. 
But  oh,  treacherous  memory,  knowing  is  one 
thing,  and  feeling  a  magical  other!  I  had  for- 
gotten how  sweet  was  the  smell  of  the  succulent 
new  grass,  how  silver-blithe  the  robin  at  my 
morning  window,  how  ineffably  tender  the  green 
of  the  leafing  trees.  The  shades,  transitions, 
chromatic  nuances  of  this  spring  foliage;  who 
has  ever  expressed  their  charm  and  loveliness? 
They  are  as  ethereal  as  colors  seen  in  dreams,  yet 
as  fresh  and  splendidly  vivid  as  the  first  flower 
of  Eden's  garden.  Gaze  at  the  willow,  for  ex- 
ample, until  that  delicate  ravishment  of  budding 
life  is  part  of  you,  and  then  let  your  vision  feed 
on  the  dark  emerald  of  the  lawn  uplit  by  yellow 
splashes  of  sun;  what  a  contrast,  what  exhaust- 
less  pleasure  of  shifting  tints  and  tones,  and  all 
within  the  gamut  of  a  single  color,  nature's  sum- 
mer favorite !  And  peach  and  cherry  trees,  too, 
are  aburst  with  blossoms,  pink,  perfect,  scattering 
odors  as  a  wind-puff  scatters  leaves;  the  apple 
boughs  will  follow  soon  and  add  their  virginal 
whiteness  to  the  orchard  symphony.  Then  how 
the  birds  respond  to  the  lure  of  the  sun !  It  will 
be  high  tide  with  them  before  one  is  awake,  for 
even  to-day,  listening,  you  shall  hear  bobolinks, 
grosbeaks,  and  orioles,  in  full  chorus.  A  robin,  fat 
and  familiar  in  his  gayety  of  livery,  alights  on 
the  ground  only  a  few  feet  off,  and  with  head 
a-cock  lets  one  admire  his  splendor  of  waistcoat 


176  FORCES   IN   FICTION 

and  the  smug  proportions  of  one  who  is  the  pride 
of  his  family.  And  in  early  evening,  the  thrush- 
note  floats  down  from  among  the  tree-tops  like  a 
voice  from  the  other  side  of  the  year.  The  first 
twilights  out-of-doors,  how  good  they  are,  what 
mystic  hours  of  revery  and  sweet  illusion !  Once 
again  the  frogs  are  at  it  in  the  pond,  and  the  vast, 
vocal  night  takes  their  croaking  and  blends  it  in 
with  the  other  nocturnal  noises,  by  some  wonder- 
work making  a  many-voiced  music. 

When  the  moon  rolls  up  from  the  nether  east 
to  make  fairyland  of  the  wood,  and  shows  us  our 
dear  ones  sitting  by  our  side  draped  in  soft  cling- 
ing white  stuffs  and  with  uncovered  hair,  upon 
which  the  dews  fall  harmless,  and  from  which 
exhale  the  rich  scents  of  some  exotic  of  the  south, 
how  sense-enthralling  yet  spiritual  is  the  hour! 
Hark,  that  you  may  pick  out,  in  the  orchestra  of 
night,  the  pellucid  obligato  of  the  little  stream 
yonder  in  the  bottom  glade.  For  now  are  the 
waters  loosened,  every  brook  overflows,  and  from 
sources  innumerable,  swollen  by  snows  wherever 
pines  make  shade,  and  hoar  and  cavernous  rocks 
elude  the  sun's  touch,  the  rivulets  turn  torrents, 
and  what  was  yesterday  a  barren  place  to-day 
promises  fair  pasturage  for  flocks  and  herds.  That 
sweet-sounding  phrase,  ^^the  sound  of  many 
waters,"  came  to  the  singer  on  some  such  time 
and  tide  as  this,  when  spring  wrought  marvels 
with  the  land,  and  Nature  donned  her  festal  robes 
after  the  sack-cloth  and  ashes  of  hibernation.    If 


INDOORS   AND    OUT  177 

one  be  a  veritable  worshipper  of  Pan,  may  not 
the  murmur  of  the  sap  running  up  in  the  trees  be 
heard  distinctlier  the  more  of  love  is  in  the  soul  ? 
A  gentle,  mellow  sound  it  is,  an  overtone  of  joy 
to  the  graver  doings  of  earth  and  sky.  Some  day 
now  I  shall  uncover  deep  in  the  boscage  the  shy 
pink  blooms  and  the  spicy  fragrance  of  the  arbu- 
tus, firstling  of  April  flowers.  Ah,  Spring,  of  a 
truth,  thou  art  the  Age  of  Gold  come  again; 
eternal  youth  is  in  thy  buoyant  paths,  and  mortal 
man  must  be  enamoured  of  thee  until  the  end  of 
ends. 


A  LIST  of  IMPORTANT  FICTION 
THE  BOBBS-MERRILL  COMPANY 


A  ROMANCE  OF  AMERICAN  CHIVALRY 

THE  LAW 
OF  THE  LAND 


Of  Miss  Lady,  whom  it  involved  in  mystery,  and  of 

John  Eddring,  gentleman  of  the  South, 

who  read  its  deeper  meaning 

By  EMERSON  HOUGH,  Author  of  The  Mississippi  Bubble 


Romantic,  unhackneyed,  imaginative,  touched 
with  humor,  full  c^f^  spirit  and  dash. 

Chicago  Record  Herald 

So  virile,  so  strong,  so  full  of  the  rare  qualities  of 
beauty  and  truth.  New  Tork  Press 

A  powerful  novel,  vividly  presented.  The  action 
is  rapid  and  dramatic,  and  the  romance  holds  the 
reader  with  irresistible  force. 

Detroit  Tribune 

Pre-eminently  superior  to  any  literary  creation  of 
the  day.  Its  naturalness  places  it  on  the  plane  of 
immortality.  New  Tork  American 

Illustrated  by  Arthur  I.  Keller 
I  zmo,  cloth,  price,  ;^  i .  50 


The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


A  THOROUGHBRED  GIRL 


ZELDA  DAMERON 


By  MEREDITH  NICHOLSON 
Author  of  The  Main  Chance 


Zelda  Dameron  is  in  all  ways  a  splendid  and 
successful  story.  There  is  about  it  a  sweetness,  a 
wholesomeness  and  a  sturdiness  that  will  commend 
it  to  earnest,  kindly  and  wholesome  people. 

Boston  Transcript 

The  whole  story  is  thoroughly  American.  It  is 
lively  and  breezy  throughout — a  graphic  description 
of  a  phase  of  life  in  the  Middle  West. 

Toledo  Blade 

A  love  story  of  a  peculiarly  sweet  and  attractive 
sort, — the  interpretation  of  a  girl's  life,  the  revelation 
of  a  human  heart.  New  Orleans  Picayune 


With  portraits  of  the  characters  in  color 

By  John  Cecil  Clay 

izmo,  cloth,  price,  %\,^o 


The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


LOVE   IN   LIVERY 


THE  MAN 
ON  THE  BOX 


By  HAROLD  MacGRATH 
Author  of  The  Puppet  Crown  and  The  Grey  Cloak 


This  is  the  brightest,  most  sparkling  book  of  the 
season,  crisp  as  a  new  greenback,  telling  a  most 
absorbing  story  in  the  most  delightful  way.  There 
never  was  a  book  whch  held  the  reader  more 
fascinated.  Albany  Times-Union 

The  best  novel  of  the  year. 

Seattle  Post-Intelligencer 

Satire  that  stops  short  of  caricature,  humor  that 
never  descends  to  burlesque,  sentiment  that  is  too 
wholesome  and  genuine  to  veige  upon  sentimentality, 
these  are  reasons  enough  for  liking  The  Man  on  the 
Box,  quite  aside  from  the  fact  thas  it  is  a  refreshing 
novelty  in  fiction.  New  York  Globe 

Illustrated  by  Harrison  Fisher 
1 2mo,  cloth,  price,  ^  i .  50 


The    Bobbs-Merrill    Company,    Indianapolis 


HEARTS,    GOLD   AND   SPECULATION 


BLACK   FRIDAY 


By  FREDERIC  S.  ISHAM 
Author  of  The  Strollers  and  Under  the  Rose 


There  is  much  energy,  much  spirit,  in  this 
romance  of  the  gold  comer.  Distinctly  an  opulent 
and  animated  tale.  New  York  Sun 


Black  Friday  fascinates  by  its  compelling  force 
and  grips  by  its  human  intensity.  No  better  or 
more  absorbing  novel  has  been  published  in  a  decade. 

Newark  Advertiser 


The  love  story  is  handled  vdth  infinite  skill.  The 
pictures  of  "the  street'*  and  its  thrilling,  pulsating 
life  are  given  with  rare  power. 

Boston  Herald 


Illustrated  by  Harrison  Fisher 
l2mo,  cloth,  price,  ;^l.50 


The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


A  ROMANCE  OF   LOVE  AND  POLITICS 

THE 
PLUM    TREE 

A  New  Novel 

By  DAVID  GRAHAM  PHILLIPS 

Author  of  "The  Cost,"  "Golden  Fleece,"  Etc. 

In  this  new  novel  the  author  of  '*  The  Cost  " 
sounds  a  trumpet  call  to  American  patriotism  and 
integrity. 

First  and  last  "The  Plum  Tree  *'  is  a  love  story 
of  the  highest  order — interesting,  ennobling,  puri- 
fying. 

Senator  Depew  says:  **Well  written  and  dra- 
matic, as  might  be  expected  from  the  pen  of 
Phillips." 

Senator  Frye  says;  **  A  wonderful  story  of 
American  political  life." 

Senator  Beveridge  Fiys:  **  Plot,  action,  color, 
vitality,  make  '  The  Plum  Tree'  thrilling." 

Drawings  by  E.  M.  Ashe 
Bound  in  Cloth,  izmo,  ^1.50 

The  Bobbs- Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


AN   ADMIRABLE    TALE.' 


THE 

MILLIONAIRE 

BABY 

By  anna  KATHARINE  GREEN 
Author  of  "The  Filigree  Ball" 

"This  Stirring,  this  absorbing,  this  admirable 
tale."  New  York  Sun 

*«  A  thrillingly  sensational  piece  of  fiction — *The 
Millionaire  Baby. " '  St.  Paul  Pioneer  Press 

**  Certain  to  keep  you  up  to  the  wee  sma' 
hours. '  *  Chicago  Journal 

*«  Handled  with  consummate  dexterity,  adroit- 
ness and  fertility  of  invention."       Brooklyn  Times 

**  A  detective  story  that  is  a  detective  story.'* 

Judge 

**  One  reads  fi-om  page  to  page  with  breathless 
interest."  New  York  Times 

**  The  reader  is  kept  in  a  state  of  tiptoe  expec- 
tation from  chapter  to  chapter."        Boston  Herald 

*'Anna  Katharine  Green  shows,  in  'The  Mil- 
lionaire Baby,'  a  'fertility  of  brain  simply  marvel- 
ous. '  *  Philadelphia  Item 

Beautifully  Illustrated  by  A.  I.  Keller 
izmo,  ^1.50 

The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


THE  LIFE  AND  LOVES  OF  LORD  BYRON 

THE 
CASTAWAY 


*•  Three  great  men  ruined  in  one  year — a  king,  a  cad  and  a 
castaway. ' ' — Byron. 

By  HALLIE  ERMINIE  RIVES 
Author  of  Hearts  Courageous 


Lord  Byron's  personal  beauty,  nis  brilliancy,  Hs 
genius,  his  possession  of  a  title,  his  love  affairs,  his 
death  in  a  noble  cause,  all  make  him  the  most  mag- 
netic figure  in  English  Hterature.  In  Miss  Rives' s 
novel  the  incidents  of  his  career  stand  out  in  ab- 
sorbing pov^er  and  enthralling  force. 

The  most  profoundly  sympathetic,  yvnA  and  true 
portrait  of  Byron  ever  drawn. 
Calvin  Dill  Wilson,  author  of  Byron — Man  and  Poet 

Dramatic  scenes,  thrilling  incidents,  strenuous 
events  follow  one  another;  pathos,  revenge  and 
passion ;  a  strong  love ;  and  through  all  these,  under 
all  these,  is  the  poet,  the  man,  George  Gordon. 

Grand  Rapids  Herald 

With  eight  illustrations  in  color  by 

Howard  Chandler  Christy 

l2mo,  cloth,  price,  ;^i.oo  everywhere 

The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


A  BOOK  TO  MAKE  THE  SPHINX  LAUGH 

IN  THE  BISHOP'S 
CARRIAGE 

By  MIRIAM  MICHELSON 


From  the  moment  when,  in  another  girl's  chin- 
chilla coat,  Nance  Olden  jumps  into  the  unknown 
carriage,  and,  snuggling  up  to  the  solemn  owner, 
calls  him  "Daddy,'*  till  she  makes  her  final  bow, 
a  happy  wife  and  a  triumphant  actress,  she  holds 
your  fancy  captive  and  your  heart  in  thrall. 

If  jaded  novel  readers  want  a  new  sensation,  they 
will  get  it  here.  Chicago  Tribune 

For  genuine,  unaffected  enjoyment,  read  the  ad- 
ventures of  this  dashing  desperado  in  petticoats. 

Philadelphia  Item 

It  is  beguiling,  bewitching,  bristling  with  origi- 
nality ;  light  enough  for  the  laziest  invalid  to  rest  his 
brain  over,  profound  enough  to  serve  as  a  sermon 
to  the  humanitarian.  San  Francisco  Bulletin 

Illustrated  by  Harrison  Fisher 
1 2mo,  cloth,  price,  ^1.50 


The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  Indianapolis 


.^/ 


\^^i^= 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 

Return  to  desk  from  which  borrowed. 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


^N*  5 1953111 


28Mar'56jJf 
MAR  I  4  1956  LO 

3iM^'56GB 
MAYS  11956 


REC'D  Lp 


NOV  U  195 


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NOV    6  ^aoi 
REC'D  LD 

FEB  21 1962 


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